“They never thought I was going to make it here,” says Ledger of America. “I mean, physically get here. One reason is that the work I did on TV in Australia was crap. My mom and dad were the first to laugh about it.”

“His big break was a show called Sweat,” recalls his father. “It was about young Olympic hopefuls. He had a choice of two roles. One was the swimmer and the other was the gay bicyclist. I was thinking to myself, Yeah, he’ll choose the swimmer! I used to be a swimmer when I was younger. This’ll be great! But then he told me he chose the gay role. I went, ‘Oh, God … well, O.K.’ But his response to that was ‘Look, Dad, this is more of an acting role. So if I want to get some sort of recognition, that’s the one I should be doing.’ He wasn’t fazed by any of the other stuff. But his father was a little … in the back of your mind, you sort of think … I mean, well, if Heath ended up gay in his life, I’d still love him as much as I do right now.”

“It wasn’t that painful to leave and head for Sydney,” says Ledger. “Not at that age. No matter how good your family life is, you just want out. Perth is the most isolated city in the world, but it’s beautiful. I just had to move on. It’s always been like that for me. I’ve always kept going going going going going.… I’m sure my parents were really concerned, but they were wise enough not to show it to me too much. They knew they were not going to stop me. They knew I was going to go. They’re amazing. They really just fucking let me fly!” Ledger breaks into one of those smiles that can fill a screen as easily as one of the best of Tom Cruise’s. “My dad loves being a father. He has to be a father, which I love and hate. I guess it started when I left home, but our relationship went from being in each other’s face to being best friends. I guess that comes from understanding him as an adult now that I’m an adult. It’s amazing when you come to accept each other’s mistakes and let each other make them.” He shakes his head. “It’s amazing,” he says quietly.

“Heath took off at a very early age,” says Kim Ledger, just as quietly. “He’s barely been home since then. It broke my heart. We spent our life together playing sports. I’d run him around to this and that. You participate [as a parent] in everything they do. So when they take off, it’s like … well … it’s like a divorce.… But I’ve always been a person who believes that people who break kids’ spirits should be jailed. It should be a capital offense. We all have our individual spirits.”

Rock Eisteddfod?

“It’s a nationwide high-school competition,” says Ledger. “It’s a dance thing. You get about 60 or 80 students. You have to create an eight-minute dance piece to a topic you’ve picked. You have to create your own sets and costumes. And you’ve got a month or two to do it. Usually a lot of girls’ schools do it. We were the first all-guys school to ever do it. Our topic was fashion,” he says with an actory aplomb that could send his leading lady reeling. “It was pretty cheesy. But we won the competition. I choreographed the whole thing. Sixty male students—all farmers at a military school—who had never danced before. We were doing it just to get out of school and go to the competition so we could meet all those girls. We went through all the different aspects of fashion. It was cool, man. These kids had never danced and didn’t think they could do it. I remember the first meeting we had. All of them were kind of surly, going, ‘Fuck this. I’m not gonna dance.’ I had to literally get up in front of all these surly guys and put on a song and just dance. By the end, when they won the competition, they were so fucking blown away by it. For starters, that they could simply win something, but also that they could dance. I guess it was like a Gene Kelly movie. Like Summer Stock.”