Heath Ledger will always remember the day he saw the poster for A Knight's Tale. The young Australian actor, who made a splash in last summer's The Patriot, was in London working 18-hour days on the period adventure Four Feathers when the one-sheet arrived. There he saw his own eyes, larger than life, staring back at him, with the words "HE WILL ROCK YOU" emblazoned below his steely face. And he realized the advertising blitz for a $40 million enterprise would be all about...him.
"I got really nervous. I think I started shaking." recalls Ledger, who, months later, is clearly still uncomfortable with being the focus of Columbia Pictures' marketing campaign. "Sure, the story is based around his knight's character, but it's about a group of people. It's an ensemble piece - it always was... It was like, F---! I've done all this work, but ultimately, these guys are making decisions that could either really make or break my career. And it's out of my hands."
Heath Ledger, welcome to superstardom. Whether he likes it or not, A Knight's Tale, about a British commoner who impersonates a master jouster, has been positioned as a teen-idol-making vehicle for Ledger, akin to what William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet was for leonardo DiCaprio in 1996. Like that film, A Knight's Tale is a classic story featuring anachronistic flourishes - in this case contemporary music and dialogue - that's targeted squarely at younger audiences. And although Ledger perceives the movie as an ensemble piece - his character, William Thatcher, does have a ragtag band of buddies - the 22-year-old actor is the face on the billboards, trailer and TV ads. And then there's that poster.
Which isn't to say Ledger isn't deserving of the attention. As Thatcher (and his royal alter ego, Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein), he sings, dances, romances, and, of course, jousts. And the studio is banking on the hope that in two-plus hours, a new Leo - or at least a new action hero - just might be born.
Columbia execs have no problem admitting that they're pinning one of their two summer tent poles (the other being July's Julia Robert's romantic comedy, America's Sweethearts) on Ledger's hunky mug. "We went through various choices [for the poster]." says Jeff Blake, the studio's president for worldwide marketing and distribution. "But I gotta admit, when it came to putting a head of armor on that image, it just didn't seem like a good idea."
Indeed, even the film's writer-director feels the role fits Ledger like a metal glove. "In the movie he plays the character, but he's also playing Heath Ledger." says Brian Helgeland, the L.A. Confidential co-screenwriter who made his directorial debut with 1999's Payback. "I mean, Clint Eastwood plays Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson plays Mel Gibson. Bruce Willis is a movie star because people like that Bruce Willis persona. You look at Heath and you feel like you know him, even though you don't."
At New York City's Regency Hotel bar, the extremely fidgety Ledger is shredding his cocktail napkins. Sitting with a Camel Light in one hand and a Heineken in the other, the surprisingly tall (6'3") actor lets go of these vices only to grab a handful of crayons and doodle urgently on the white paper squares that rip apart from the force of his strokes. "I have very little patience. I get bored really quickly," says Ledger, whose mania is reminiscent of Mel Gibson on a talk show couch, only jacked up a few notches (and with a lot more F-words). "I have ADD, I'm convinced." It was that impatience that caused Ledger, the oldest son of Kim, an engineer, and Sally, a French tutor, to develop a love for acting and dancing while studying at Guilford Grammar School in his hometown of Perth. "I hated the school," he says. "It was about teaching kids how to fire semiautomatic weapons. It was breeding an army for the country. It was like 'Be proud for the school, fight for the school.' And I wasn't falling into that f---ing system. I'm not a patriot to the flag; I'm a patriot to my family. I found myself getting A's from teachers that I really loved and f---ing failing miserably with the people I didn't."
After graduating at 16, Ledger cured his restlessness with a 2,700-mile soul-searching road trip to Sydney, which he knew was home to Australia's entertainment scene. "If I was going to portray a person or an emotion, I had to at least be able to portray myself," he says, adding, "I had 80 cents in the bank account. So I had to get a job." After appearing in a handful of Aussie productions, he landed the lead role in the 1997 Fox adventure series Roar. Though it was considered a Braveheart rip-off and canceled after one season, the show helped lead to bigger roles in 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You and last year's Revolutionary War drama The Patriot, in which he played Mel Gibson's son.
When Columbia execs saw early footage of The Patriot, they realized Ledger could carry his own film. "From the time I read the [Knight's Tale] script, he was always the person we wanted," says studio chairman Amy Pascal. "We offer him everything." That includes the lead role in the upcoming Spider-Man, which Ledger declined. "I just don't care for comics," he says. "Never have. Never cared for Spider-Man. It would have been stealing someone else's dream." The role eventually went to Tobey Maguire.
Ledger sees his relationship with the studio a bit differently from Pascal. "I was their investment," he says bluntly."They saw me and they invested money in me in The Patriot and said, 'Okay, let's pop him out in that, let's get another product, let's promote it, and let's bring in the bucks.' Slightly f---ing frustrating. It's an intimidating move on their part." Pascal responds: "I don't see him as a product. He's at a time where he's having to sell a movie that is mostly on his back, which is a scary thing the first time you do it."
Though he may sound like the reluctant superstar, Ledger insists he's simply being realistic. "People [at Columbia] are really worried right now," he continues. "It's called insurance. 'See, [the film] is tracking!' They're so all about their digits that they forget about word of mouth and trusting in a good film... I've seen the movie and I loved it, so we all are successful." Admits Columbia's Blake, "Let's face it: When you look at the competition -The Mummy Returns and Pearl Harbor - there's no question we want to compete and survive. So we're being aggressive." Part of the studio's aggressiveness involved asking Ledger to embark on a 12-city North American promotional tour. "I'm fighting that. It's a negotiation process," says Ledger, who eventually agreed to a scaled-down version of the trip. "I flew from Perth to Sydney, the next day to L.A., the next day to Dallas, the next day to Atlanta, the next day to Chicago, and the next day to New York," he says. "I think that's compromising." While Blake says Ledger is "certainly doing what we need him to do," it's not without a fight. Says the actor, "You've got to stop and say, 'Well, no, I'm not a politician."
Maybe not, but Ledger has become something of a punchline - if only to his close friends."You should hear the f --- ing messages I have on my answering machine,"he groans. "' You gonna rock me, man?' I'm just getting so much f --- ing flak from them, it's not funny." (One can only imagine the ribbing had he accepted that Spider-Man role.)
Perhaps to avoid such pigeonholing, Ledger's follow-up projects will veer far away from teen territory. In Four Feathers (based on the same book as the 1939 film), from Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur, he plays a British military officer who is viewed as a coward when he resigns before a battle. "It's deep, deep, deep," says the actor. "It's not a movie that teenagers are supposed to come in and understand.
It's, like, beyond that." As Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein, who's one of Four Feathers' producers, puts it, "This is 'Say goodbye to your one-minute moment of Heath Ledger, Teen Idol.' He wanted to lose that image and take on a tougher role." Later this month, the actor will head to Louisiana for two weeks of shooting opposite Billy Bob Thornton in Monsters Ball, the story of a father and son who work on death row.
As promising as Ledger's career looks now, there was a time when Hollywood didn't consider him the next big thing. A few years ago, Weinstein, who has made a career out of nurturing young talent like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, rejected Ledger for a lead role in a still-uncast European soccer flick called Calcio. "Oh yeah, isn't that ironic?" Ledger says with a grin. "Thanks, Harvey!" Both parties admit they needed to clear the air before shooting began on Four Feathers. "He joked about it in his kind of passive-aggressive way," says Ledger. Weinstein cracks, "I said,'I don't even know whether I saw [your screen test] or not; that's how good you were, Heath!'.... He's brilliant in all his movies," Weinstein adds quickly, "but even he admits he's not the best at auditions."
For now, Ledger professes indifference to A Knight's Tale's eventual box office victory or defeat. "If the movie comes out and it bombs, it's not my money that's going to be lost," he says. "And what that does to my career, I don't really care. If it's the end of it, then fine. I came in, had a sniff, and left. It's that sort of ruthlessness I guess you just have to have to be able to brush that off."
He's also had to fend off considerable tabloid interest in his love life, spurred on by a relationship with an actress nine years his senior. Ledger met Boogie Nights star Heather Graham in Prague last summer while he was shooting A Knight's Tale and she was filming the upcoming Jack the Ripper thriller From Hell; they've been together since. "It's funny," says Ledger, explaining his attraction to more mature women (previous girlfriends include Roar costar Lisa Zane, in her mid-30s when they dated four years ago). "You find a lot of women, when they get older - older than I am, anyhow - they don't have to pretend to be older anymore. So they go back to being young." So, what if A Knight's Tale does turn him into a Leo-size luminary? Again, Ledger professes indifference. "A lot of people think ambition or success and they think dollars," Ledger says. "My ambition is all in my head. I'm on a f --- ing journey. I'm on a walkabout. It's about collecting wisdom of emotions and heart and self and understanding. Being absolutely comfortable with your body and life and the earth, sun, and moon being the only truths. That's what my success is, getting underneath that." For once, he stops doodling. "At the f --- ing end of the day, that's the only thing you're going to carry with you when you die." Good luck fitting that on a poster.

Article written by Dave Karger