Man of the World

Chivalry is not dead. At least if you’re in the company of Heath Ledger, a barely 21-year-old Australian actor whose courtesy extends to ensuring that the smoke of his cigarette isn’t troublesome, that a visitor’s not sitting in direct sunlight and that almost every single craftsperson and fellow cast member is spoken of in the most glowing and respectful of terms.

All of this is a bit surprising, considering Ledger’s youth, but not so when compared with his role in “The Patriot,” which opened Wednesday. In this Revolutionary War saga, Ledger cuts quite an action figure as a teenager named Gabriel who joins the Continental Army--against the wishes of his father (Mel Gibson)--to fight the British. But he also infuses Gabriel with the same geniality he exhibits in person, as well as idealism and a sense of romance.

Role of Son Proved Difficult to Cast

“It was a difficult role to cast because Gabriel’s very much a boy, but also a young man, not an adolescent,” says “Patriot” producer Dean Devlin, of hiring Ledger--an Australian--to play an American colonist. “The tough thing is that a lot of the young actors today, they feel like teenagers. And Heath, even though only 21, feels like a man in his demeanor and conviction. It was really hard to find those qualities in one person, and Heath had them. That’s why he’s able to capture so many aspects of his character.”

And these characteristics, Mel Gibson agrees, could mean we’ll see more of Ledger on the big screen. “He does his stuff really well, he’s got a real good screen presence and a lot of talent,” Gibson says. “He’s more mature than I was at that age. He seems more worldly, seems to know his way around.”

Ledger--who stands over 6 feet tall--describes himself as “extremely laid back” and “casual” and says he’s just finished reading “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior,” by Dan Millman. In person, he exudes such a serene and civil disposition that it’s hard to imagine that he was so flustered during his “Patriot” audition for Devlin and director Roland Emmerich that he got up and walked out before he was finished.

“About halfway through the second scene I was reading, I just stopped, dropped my head and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so embarrassed. I’m wasting your time, I’m wasting my time, I’m really embarrassed,” Ledger recalls. “ ‘I’m going to have to leave; if you want me to come back, I’ll prepare it better for you.’ I was really nervous, but, you know, I came back because I guess they were curious.”

Devlin remembers that he and Emmerich realized Ledger was just plain nervous. “You can tell the difference between someone who knows what they’re doing versus someone who is faking it. Heath knew what he was doing.”

Faking it is not in Ledger’s actor’s manual. Since he was 10, he has been fine-tuning his craft, first for a local theater in his hometown of Perth in West Australia, and eventually in several Australian TV series, most notably the drama “Sweat.”

His parents, who are no longer married, he says, were supportive without being smothering. His father works as an engineer in the racing car industry and neither he nor Ledger’s mother, who’s raising another son full-time at home, ever forced success onto their son.

“They’d say, ‘If you want to go do it, do it. It’s not going to come knocking on your door.’ They were supportive in that way, to help me find what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be as a person by myself, instead of feeding me with what they thought was right with me.”

Ledger says his breakthrough came with the lead role in “Roar,” the Fox Broadcasting Co.’s short-lived summer 1997 series, set in the year 400. In “Roar,” Ledger swung a sword as a reluctant hero pledged to save his people--hmmm, sound familiar? The series gave Ledger his first exposure outside Australia.

“ ‘Roar’ was definitely the gig that opened doors for me, and it gave me an opportunity to get an agent here,” he says. Plus, it helped persuade Devlin to audition Ledger for the part of Gabriel in “The Patriot.”

“I wasn’t familiar with his work,” Devlin recalls. “Someone sent me a tape of ‘Roar,’ where Heath played a Mel Gibson-type character. And when I saw him, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ ”

After “Roar,” Ledger took a break from the action-adventure genre to play the romantic lead in “10 Things I Hate About You,” a 1999 update of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” Though the film gave Ledger a chance to pitch some woo--particularly in a memorable song-and-dance sequence in which he croons “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”--he still laments that he hasn’t had a true on-screen love scene yet.

“I love love stories,” says Ledger, whose parents named him after Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” “I’m not an action hero at all. I enjoy the physical side of the work, I like getting in there and doing my stuff, but I like to go a little deeper than that.”

Currently Shooting Medieval-Knight Tale

Indeed, Ledger can go deep. Last year, the Australian Film Institute nominated him for best actor for his role in “Two Hands,” a gangster film co-starring Bryan Brown. “Two Hands,” though extremely popular in Australia, hasn’t found a theatrical distributor in the U.S. “It’s a really fantastic movie,” says Ledger, “but here it went straight to Blockbuster. It’s so Australian, Americans would have no idea what we’re talking about.”

Currently, Ledger is filming “A Knight’s Tale,” directed and written by Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential”), in which Ledger plays a squire in medieval England with a drive to compete in jousting tournaments.

“It’s an identity crisis for this character because he thinks that to achieve something in life he has to be at a certain status,” Ledger says. “He doesn’t want to be nothing and nothing is a peasant and a squire. So he goes out to discover that.”

Ledger describes the shoot, on location in Prague, as “light and happy” and heaps praise on his co-stars Mark Addy (“The Full Monty”) and Paul Bettany (who plays Chaucer before the author wrote “The Canterbury Tales”). Ledger also delights in the fact that he gets another chance to sing and dance. “It’s fun to kick up your heels every now and then,” he says.

As for the action-adventure aspect, Ledger says, “It just seems like I can’t get off a horse. I’m on a horse in every bloody movie I’ve done! I’m on a horse in ‘The Patriot,’ and I’m on a horse in ‘Knight’s Tale,’ and next I’m on a camel!”

The camel will enter Ledger’s life when he begins work in Morocco on his next film, “Four Feathers,” a remake of the 1939 Zoltan Korda film about a British army officer who must prove he’s not a coward during the Sudan uprising. Although Ledger says he’s looking forward to working with director Shekhar Kapur (“Elizabeth”), he confesses that he hasn’t prepared for the role yet “because I’m too busy being a squire.”

Traveling from South Carolina, where “The Patriot” was filmed, to Prague and then eventually to Morocco doesn’t give Ledger--who’s currently single--much of a chance to unpack, but that’s the way he says he likes it. “I lived in Los Angeles for two years. I have a storage unit here and a car, and that’s my home. I’ve been in Prague now for two months, with another two months there before I go to Morocco for four months. So I don’t live anywhere at all. I’m like a gypsy, I guess. It’s fun; I just live out of my bags.”

Though Ledger good-naturedly complains about riding horses at work, he admits that he also rides them in his spare time. In fact, he fondly relates how he used to ride through Griffith Park when he lived in L.A. “I used to go riding with an Australian friend of mine. He’d been out here for a while and somehow he got a job at a horse ranch as a tour guide. And they’d shut down every night around 6 or 7 and we’d go out there and grab the horses and ride all through the night to the observatory.”

In addition to horseback riding, Ledger shoots a musket for his role in “The Patriot.” “It’s always fun with this job because you get to learn all these crazy little skills. I mean, when am I ever gong to fire a musket again? And we did fire them. We set little bottles up on the hill and shot at them.”

Making a Fuss Over Three Stitches

As if to prove that he indeed shot a musket, Ledger proudly displays a scar he acquired when his index finger got stuck against his gun’s flint rock. “It was my first set of stitches,” Ledger explains, cradling his finger. “The worst thing about it was that the rock was layered with gunpowder that jammed into my wound. So I was screaming like a baby. They took me to the hospital, gutted it out and stitched it up. I went straight back to work. They only gave me, like, three stitches, but I wanted five because I’d made such a fuss and I wanted to go back and say, ‘At least I had five stitches!’ ”

Working with Gibson--who grew up in Australia and is especially revered there--posed a bit of a challenge for Ledger, who says he wasn’t intimidated but a bit nervous. “I just wanted to give him a lot because I knew he was going to give me a lot,” he says. “I just wanted to live up to something and give him something to work with. I guess I was nervous in finding that within myself to see if I could do it. But, you know, he puts you at ease within the first few minutes of meeting him. He’s a lovely man, incredibly funny and professional. He’s everything that you wouldn’t think a superstar would be.”

As for whether Ledger aspires to be a star himself, he says his goals aren’t that specific. “I like to leave things open and let things present themselves, and then indulge them or turn my back on them.”

What comes across initially as humility on Ledger’s part, Gibson suggests, may actually be cautious restraint as he begins to attract more attention. “I think it may be getting a little weird for him,” Gibson says. “I’m only guessing here, because I haven’t talked to him about this, but it could be getting a little ‘out there’ for him. He might be thinking, ‘Whoa-a-a-a-a! Hold on for the ride,’ you know?”