HEATH LEDGER

Nearly a decade ago, Annie Proulx wrote a story featuring intensely filmable people (modern cowboys) getting up to something pretty unfilmable (having sex with each other). Actors have romanced Brokeback Mountain ever since, as if it were a rancher's beautiful daughter with a drug problem, or a revolver. A dare: Who'd be man enough to play gay? "My agent told me, 'You're perfect for this one,'" Heath Ledger says. The twenty-six-year-old's laugh is gruffly musical. "If anything, if there was a risk involved, it excited me. I like causing trouble."

The Lord gave Ledger marketable looks -- a Connery brow and jaw line, framing a mouth peaked for kisses -- but lots of days he looks like he woke up inside an oil drum. His race-car-designer dad prepped him as "the next Michael Schumacher." Instead, Ledger wandered into high school drama class, secured TV gigs as boyfriends good and bad, then stepped out of classrooms forever. After the triple dreamboat whammy of 10 Things I Hate About You, The Patriot (as a publicist's fantasy: Mel Gibson's son) and A Knight's Tale, he found himself at the big studio table. Executives mapped out a career with the shape of an Entourage season: billboards and paydays. They wanted this Aussie kid from Perth ("It's the most isolated city in the world") to play Spider-Man. Ledger walked out. "I was like, 'Ah, fucking hell. I'm part of a machine.' I started to feel like a bottle of Coke. And there was a whole marketing scheme on to turn me into a very popular bottle. And Coke tastes like shit. But there's posters everywhere so people will buy it. So I felt like I tasted like shit, and I was being bought for no reason."

He flubbed publicity spots -- interviewers with softballs: "'What are people going to get out of the movie?' 'Fuck, I don't know, a full belly of popcorn?'" -- and picked roles to dirty himself up: The Four Feathers, The Order. "I wanted to take the blond out of my career. I wanted to be bad, I wanted to be good. I wanted to keep tricking people . . . I was like, 'Well now, how am I gonna make this a career I would like to have?'"

Ledger now speaks in the unclenched voice of a man who knows he's done the best work of his life. He's got a new baby daughter, Matilda, with co-star Michelle Williams. Holiday Oscar talk is beginning to swirl more tightly around him, like water going around a sink. Meanwhile, with Brokeback having just opened, studios are bracing as a whole mountainous region of the country prepares to feel maligned by Hollywood. "There's a lot of angry, stupid people out there, who are so busy worrying about this gay marriage crap," he says. "Those people may have a problem with this. But I say, 'Good.'" And in the pre-release cycle of praise and backlash, writers are speculating whether Ledger's own new fatherhood is an accident -- or if it's any accident that he's also starring as Casanova, the heterosexual lover that every man in every bar, polishing off his fourth drink, secretly imagines himself to be. Ledger considers this dryly. "Oh, right. Yep, well, that's cool. What a plan. What a grand master plan. I sat around, I concocted that. What a genius." Ledger isn't listening to careful advice. "I'd like to make my own mistakes. I don't like people making them for me. That's not that hard to understand, right?" As he says in Brokeback, "Ain't no reins on this one."

Comeback Kid: Fiona Apple