Last night’s Tonight Show appearance by Heath Ledger was fairly remarkable, because Ledger and Leno managed to talk for a solid 15 minutes, much of it about Ang Lee and Brokeback, and never mention the word gay or anything approximating it.
Ledger: “I just looked at it as an incredible opportunity to play this, you know…complex, lonely figure…”
The omission seemed fairly obvious to me (so obvious that I actually went back and watched the fairly dull interview again), and made me wonder whether or not Heath’s handlers are being calculated about the image of their rising star. Gay is not an easy word to avoid when you’re talking about Brokeback Mountain.
Meanwhile, Ledger also appears in this month’s GQ. I really like the following image. It reminds me of (a cleaned up version of) one of Avedon’s portraits from the American West.
Heath Ledger: Hollywood Maverick [just jared]
