Andrew Garfield On Heath Ledger Knowing ‘The Dark Knight’ Would Be A Hit & What He Learned From Late Actor On ‘The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus’
Andrew Garfield recalls his time with Heath Ledger on the set of 2009’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Garfield said that he worked with Ledger after he had finished filming The Dark Knight and before the Christopher Nolan movie premiered, the Australian actor already knew it would be a hit.
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“He had just done the Joker, he had just finished doing The Dark Knight, and he was so smug about it,” Garfield said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I was like, ‘How did that go?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’”
The Amazing Spider-Man alum worked with Ledger early on in his career, who was critical of a magazine cover he graced in the lead-up to his take on the DC Comics villain The Joker.
“I remember his like, Empire magazine cover came out and he was like, ‘Oh, they used a f***ing sh** photo,’” Garfield said. “And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, dude that looks f***ing incredible.’ And he was like, ‘Nah, the pose is all wrong, it looks kinda like a conventional version of what an actor … you’ll see.’ And yeah, I did see.”
Ledger was found dead in January 2008, months before the release of The Dark Knight in July of that same year. The DC film became a box office success, and Ledger even won a posthumous Oscar for his interpretation of The Joker.
Garfield learned a lot from Ledger while working with him saying, “He was a kind of beacon, it was like a wild animal. He was so free and so wild and so, kind of dangerous on set in a way that was the kind of thing that is inspiring and spontaneous. He would say before every take, or one take every scene, ‘Let’s have some fun with this one.’”
He continued, “I still have lots of mementos of his. I remember the first day I met him he was wearing these amazing camo Ray Ban sunglasses and I just said, ‘Oh hey, cool sunglasses.’ And the next day they were like in my dressing room, he had just left them for me. He was just a very generous, beautiful, creative spirit.”
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