In Stetson or wig, he was hard to pin down

“I feel like I’m wasting time if I repeat myself,” he explained. Nor is he ever happy with his performance. “I can’t say I was proud of my work,” Ledger declared of his role, in I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s film on Bob Dylan. “The day I say, ‘It’s good’ is the day I should start doing something else.”

In a telephone interview from Berlin, where he was promoting I’m Not There, Haynes said that Ledger’s character was inspired by “photographs of Dylan taken in the mid-’60s.” James Dean too. “Heath has a little bit of James Dean in him, even physically, a kind of precocious seriousness. He is one of those young people who have a real intuition, a maturity beyond their years.”

The filming tied Ledger in knots. “I stressed out a little too much,” he said. Even as he spoke, Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside and had another cigarette. Polite and charming, he nonetheless gave off the sense that the last thing he wanted to do was delve deep into himself for public consumption. “It can be a little distressing to have to over-intellectualise yourself,” is how he put it.

An open bag with clothes spilling out lay on the floor of the master bedroom. “I’m kind of addicted to moving,” Ledger said, perhaps on account of having had to shuttle back and forth after his parents’ divorce, when he was 11. He carries his interests around with him, and his kitchen table was awash in objects: a chess set, assorted books, empty glasses, items of clothing.

Also on the table is a winsome photograph of Ledger’s daughter, Matilda, now a toddler. (Ledger met Matilda’s mother, the actress Michelle Williams, while filming Brokeback Mountain.)

Ledger lives in Manhattan, and when he’s home, likes to play chess with the chess sharks who hang out in Washington Square Park. But mostly he likes to hang out with Matilda—“it’s like your whole body has a lump in its throat,” he said, of having to be away.

Ledger was born in Perth, Australia and acted in some Australian soap operas before moving to Hollywood. He was cast in 10 Things, began appearing in movies like A Knight’s Tale, playing a medieval lover-jouster.

“I was more concerned with having a good time than with focusing on work,” he said. Then, “I started to look at the work and think, ‘Oh, God, maybe I should be taking this seriously, because people are going to see this,’” he said. “All I saw were mistakes.”

Ledger is learning to play the piano and to sing. He also directs music videos, has a small independent record label called Masses Music in Los Angeles and is planning to direct a film. “But,” he says, “I’ve never figured out who ‘Heath Ledger’ is on film. People feel compelled to sum you up, to presume they have you and can describe you. That’s fine. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note.”

(The piece was published in the New York Times in November 2007)
-SARAH LYALL