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At New York City's Regency Hotel bar, the extremely fidgety Ledger is shredding his cocktail napkins. Sitting with a Camel Light in one hand and a Heineken in the other, the surprisingly tall (6'3") actor lets go of those vices only to grab a handful of crayons and doodle urgently on the white paper squares that rip apart from the force of his strokes. "I have very little patience. I get bored really quickly," says Ledger, whose mania is reminiscent of Mel Gibson on a talk-show couch, only jacked up a few notches (and with a lot more F-words). "I have ADD, I'm convinced."

It was that impatience that caused Ledger, the oldest son of Kim, an engineer, and Sally, a French tutor, to develop a love for acting and dancing while studying at Guildford Grammar School in his hometown of Perth. "I hated the school," he says. "It was about teaching kids how to fire semiautomatic weapons. It was breeding an army for the country. It was like 'Be proud for the school, fight for the school.' And I wasn't falling into that f---ing system. I'm not a patriot to a flag; I'm a patriot to my family. I found myself getting A's from the teachers that I really loved and f---ing failing miserably with the people I didn't."

After graduating at 16, Ledger cured his restlessness with a 2,700-mile soul-searching road trip to Sydney, which he knew was home to Australia's entertainment scene. "If I was going to portray a person or an emotion, I had to at least be able to portray myself," he says, adding, "I had 80 cents in the bank account. So I had to get a job." After appearing in a handful of Aussie productions, he landed the lead role in the 1997 Fox adventure series Roar. Though it was considered a Braveheart rip-off and canceled after one season, the show helped lead to bigger roles in 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You and last year's Revolutionary War drama The Patriot, in which he played Mel Gibson's son.

When Columbia execs saw early footage of The Patriot, they realized Ledger could carry his own film. "From the time I read the [Knight's Tale] script, he was always the person that we wanted," says studio chairman Amy Pascal. "We offer him everything." That includes the lead role in the upcoming Spider-Man, which Ledger declined. "I just don't care for comics," he says. "Never have. Never cared for Spider-Man. It would have been stealing someone else's dream." The role eventually went to Tobey Maguire.

Ledger sees his relationship with the studio a bit differently from Pascal. "I was their investment," he says bluntly. "They saw me and they invested money in me in The Patriot and said, 'Okay, let's pop him out in that, let's get another product, let's promote it, and let's bring in the bucks.' Slightly f---ing frustrating. It's an intimidating move on their part." Pascal responds: "I don't see him as a product. He's at a time where he's having to sell a movie that is mostly on his back, which is a scary thing the first time you do it."


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