Edward Sharpe Claims To Have Been Speaking With Heath Ledger On His Final Days Including The Night Of Ledger’s Passing

Heartthrob and beloved Australian actor, Heath Ledger, known by many for his iconic roles as The Joker in The Dark Knight, Patrick Verona in 10 Things I Hate About, and Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, passed away 17 years ago in a drug overdose. The incident had hit people as an incalculably tragic lost, drawing comparisons to James Dean for its unexpectedness and prematurity.

Ledger’s untimely passing threatened to overshadow many of his achievements and goals in life, as an actor and a businessman. At the time, Ledger was a major figurehead of the Los Angeles-based production company and de facto art collective called The Masses, founded by Jon Ramos and filmmaker Matt Amato, the latter a friend of Ledger.

For some context behind the names; blending film and music culture together, the Masses was a place where Ledger could let his creative interests and skills percolate, particularly in the field of directing. While there, he would direct a number of music videos for friends and associates of The Masses. Among the projects Ledger was attached to, one of them was a film adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit, today famous for the Anya Taylor-Joy Netflix miniseries it received in 2020. Although Ledger’s ambitions with that specific project eventually dissipated.

Amos notes that Ledger was “finding a voice” with an emphasis on how he aspired to have “captured the spirit” of the artists he worked with. This probing and dynamic approach shares a great deal with Ledger’s method as an actor, with many of his films like Brokeback Mountain and I’m Not There featuring a tenderness and deftness in how he plays a moment with his scene partners.

Among the music groups circulating with The Masses at this moment, one of them were Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. The band achieved a major hit in the next year with their song “Home,” which was popular then and continues to generate heated discussion a decade and a half later. Alex Ebert, the frontman for the band, has described in a recent interview some of his experiences working with Ledger and speaks a great deal of the actor’s tastes and personalities that made him such a compatible member and partner to the scene. Ebert details that the band were to release their first album through The Masses, with Ledger advising with an artistically-minded approach of staying true to their demos and to not “re-record it better.” Ebert then describes how after the Ledger ended campaigning to make The Queen’s Gambit, the two of them came together to write a musical. The concept has yet to be divulged due to it not being realized yet though Ebert reaffirms his belief that “it’s still a good idea” hence his reticence to fully reveal it to the public until it is in a different state.

“This is something I don’t talk about much but Heath was going to be putting out our first album through his startup label. The Masses, part of this little collective we had. In fact he wanted just the demos, ‘Just stay with the demos don’t re-record it better’ he had his head on straight.

Anyway he was going to direct the Queen’s Gambit as a movie and he no longer wanted to do that. He’s like ‘What was that idea for a musical you had?’ It’s a good idea and it hasn’t been done yet   and I’m not going to divulge it here, but yeah, we were writing a musical.

We were talking about it the night he died just going through the entire thing really in depth. He was really excited about it. So I still feel like I have to resurrect that story for that night you know? So, one of these days the musical.”

 

Capping Ebert’s revisit of his days with Ledger is the declaration that they were speaking to each other up to the final night of Ledger’s life. As Ebert tells, Ledger still possessed a great deal of enthusiasm for the musical. A positivity that flows through Ebert today with an inspiration to return to the project and finish it in Ledger’s memory: “We were talking about it the night he died, just going through the entire thing really in-depth. He was really excited about it. So I still feel like I’ve got to resurrect that story for that night, you know?”