Brendan O’Neill writes for Jewcy:
The tragic death of Heath Ledger — just determined to be an overdose — has robbed Hollywood of one of its Australian stand-ins for American machismo. Never mind the trade deficit, or even Barack Obama’s "moral deficit"; Hollywood is suffering from a macho deficit, and it’s having to turn to the land of beer-swilling, sheep-shearing men-in-denim to find its cowboys and cads.
When Hollywood first flirted with all things Aussie in the 1980s, it was a bit of a po-mo joke. "Look at Crocodile Dundee with his big shiny knife and taste for lager – how quaint!" laughed cinema audiences. It’s no joke today. At a time when American stars have been feminised, preened and plucked, it’s Australia that is providing the muscle for the grittier acting jobs.
In recent years, Ledger had joined Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman and Eric Bana as a Real Bloke who could play gruff cowboys, lascivious bastards or any other role that required the leading man to have hair on his chest. In his breakthrough film 10 Things I Hate About You, a high-school spin on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Ledger looked like he had been shuttled in from another planet rather than simply another hemisphere. Where the hairless, super-tanned jock (Andrew Keegan) was boringly arrogant, and the geek with a crush (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was predictably nervous, Ledger’s scruffy, unkempt and slurry-voiced Patrick Verona was a complex macho character – nasty to begin with, but later opened up by the love of a good woman. The director even allowed him to keep his Aussie accent, as if to accentuate this untidy, unruly character’s exoticness amid the cardboard cut-out boys and girls of a typical high-school movie.
In later films, Ledger played American rather than Australian; his rugged Down Under temperament meant he was frequently more convincing as a manly American than many of the prim and waxed actors who are actually American-born. He even played cowboy better. In Brokeback Mountain, Ledger’s tortured and mumbling Ennis Del Mar is far more believable than all-American Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist. (In one scene in that film, Ledger and Gyllenhaal were required to leap naked off a cliff into a lake. Ledger did it, but Gyllenhaal was replaced by a stuntman because he is scared of heights. If you want an actor to take risks, look Down Under.)
As I’ve often said, Australians play the best poofs.
