Jake Gyllenhaal was only 27 when his friend and Brokeback Mountain co-star Heath Ledger died suddenly. As Gyllenhaal puts it in a new emotional interview, it all happened “at an age where mortality was not always clear to me.” But ruminating on Ledger’s death eight years later, Gyllenhaal has had some revelations of how that loss profoundly changed his worldview.
“Personally, it affected me in ways I can’t necessarily put in words or even would want to talk about publicly,” Gyllenhaal told *Entertainment Weekly’*s editorial director, Jess Cagle, before endeavoring to do exactly that.
Gyllenhaal says that by living in the “bubble” of “making films,” it’s not alway clear when people are being authentic. Gyllenhaal—who made his first film at the age of 11—doesn’t have much experience living outside the industry. “There are real friends, and there is a real community,” he said of his time in Hollywood. “There is also that [new Macklemore song] where he says, ‘The curtain closes and nobody notices.’. . . I think that‘s true, and I think that’s O.K.”
Ledger’s death, Gyllenhaal said, brought the contrast between reality and performance into sharp relief for him. “I think at the time, I assumed everyone would notice—and they did with Heath dying,” Gyllenhaal considered. “But I think it [gave me] the experience of, ‘This is fleeting.’” And it was his relationship with Ledger, forged on the set of Brokeback Mountain, that emerged to Gyllenhaal as the real reason to work in the business. “None of the attention or synthesized love that comes from the success of a film really matters at all,” he said. “What matters is the relationships you make when you make a film, and the people you learn from when you’re preparing for a film. That changed a lot for me.”
The personal relationships that grew out of Brokeback Mountain seem more intense than on the average film set. Gyllenhaal said making the film was particularly sad and lonely but that a “beautiful love” grew between Ledger and co-star Michelle Williams. That love resulted in a daughter, Matilda, while Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, eager to work together again, would team up again five years later for Love and Other Drugs. “We were super young. We had no idea what the movie was going to become,” Gyllenhaal said of the film that would emerge as a groundbreaking step forward for L.G.B.T. depiction on-screen and the top of anyone’s list of the films that defined Ledger’s too-short cinematic legacy.
