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There is an endless public fascination with celebrities who have died young, that dark hall of fame that includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Nick Drake. When Heath Ledger was alive, he was obsessed with them. “It was weird,” Ledger’s old friend Trevor DiCarlo says in the new Spike documentary, I Am Heath Ledger, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month and opens in a limited theatrical release today. “He always had a thing for these artists.” It’s a morbid detail made eerier by the fact that in January 2008, at age 28, Ledger followed in their footsteps.
For people of my generation—the “old millennials,” if you will—Ledger’s death will forever be one of those sudden, crushing celebrity losses that you can never, no matter how much time passes, quite believe (years later, for me, Amy Winehouse would fit into the same category). In the nine years between 10 Things I Hate About You and his death in 2008, Ledger had been electric to watch: he’d gone from teen heartthrob (Casanova, anyone?) to an Oscar nominee (Brokeback Mountain), but remained a paragon of cool throughout. Suddenly, we were watching the disturbing footage of his body being rolled out of the New York apartment where he died. The cause of death was cited as an accidental overdose of prescription pills, including sleep aids and anti-anxiety medication. But, unofficially, according to the sensational narrative that emerged in the aftermath, Ledger allegedly died of playing The Joker. Tabloid reports speculated that Ledger had so deeply immersed himself in the twisted role in The Dark Knight that he couldn’t shake it and couldn’t sleep or resume his normal life, leading him to a toxic cocktail of pills to get by. Whether that was true or not, it crept into collective consciousness: Ledger’s performance was so chilling, you couldn’t help but consider the possibility.
Nine years after his death, I Am Heath Ledger is here to declare that Ledger did not, in fact, die of Method acting—and given the film’s impressive slate of interviews (with sources like Ledger’s parents, sisters, friends, notable co-stars like Naomi Watts and Djimon Hounsou, and directors Ang Lee and Catherine Hardwicke), I’m inclined to believe it. Though it looms large for viewers, the film is far less preoccupied with Ledger’s untimely death (it doesn't really come up until the last 15 minutes of the 94-minute documentary) than it is with his life. The people closest to him say that, Yes, in the run-up to his untimely end, he’d been suffering from pneumonia and struggling with sleep. But the truth, according to his longtime agent Steve Alexander, is a far less “convenient” or “tidy” story: “He was super happy and was loving life, and he struggled with some demons but he wasn’t wanting to go anywhere but forward,” Alexander says.
Everyone knew that Ledger was one of the brightest stars of his generation, but I Am Heath Ledger reveals that he may have also been poised to follow Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford and become one of the great actor-directors. Ledger had been directing music videos, both for his good friend and singer Ben Harper and unknown, indie artists on his label, The Masses, and around the time of his death, he was in talks to make his film directorial debut with The Queen’s Gambit, about a chess prodigy addicted to prescription pills. But even before that, for much of his life, Ledger had a camera in hand. Long before the era of selfies and Instagram Stories, in footage shared by his family and close friends, Ledger frequently turns his lens on himself, documenting everything from his first flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, to his jitters behind-the-scenes of The Patriot, where he was acting opposite his idol Mel Gibson. For years, he was his own best documentarian.
His footage is a treasure trove for fans, shot at dawn at Burning Man or swirling around in his backyard, suggesting the infinite capabilities of a brilliant artist taken too soon. But it also raises, yet again, that nagging question of whether his creativity was too much to bear and what role it had, ultimately, in his end. Harper and other close friends recall how he’d call them at all hours of the night, or show up at their homes at 5:30 a.m., bursting with energy and ideas in what occasionally sounds like manic episodes. “It was like trying to settle a wild stallion,” his mother, Sally Bell, says of his urge to quit school at 17.
“How do you burn so bright all the time?” his longtime friend N’fa Jones recalls, wondering aloud. “Too much energy, too many thoughts, too much creativity . . . When you feel that good, you don’t sleep.” Ultimately, though, for the people closest to him, Ledger’s boundless energy didn’t kill him; it made him who he was.
“He felt life deeper than anyone I’ve ever met. He just took everything in,” Harper said. “Some people are just bigger than the world has room for.”