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Though he may sound like the reluctant superstar, Ledger insists he's simply being realistic. "People [at Columbia] are really worried right now," he continues. "It's called insurance. 'See, [the film] is tracking!' They're so all about their digits that they forget about word of mouth and trusting in a good film.... I've seen the movie and I loved it, so we all are successful." Admits Columbia's Blake, "Let's face it: When you look at the competition--The Mummy Returns and Pearl Harbor--there's no question we want to compete and survive. So we're being aggressive."

Part of the studio's aggressiveness involved asking Ledger to embark on a 12-city North American promotional tour. "I'm fighting that. It's a negotiation process," says Ledger, who eventually agreed to a scaled-down version of the trip. "I flew from Perth to Sydney, the next day to L.A., the next day to Dallas, the next day to Atlanta, the next day to Chicago, and the next day to New York," he says. "I think that's compromising." While Blake says Ledger is "certainly doing what we need him to do," it's not without a fight. Says the actor, "You've got to stop and say, 'Well, no, I'm not a politician.'"

Maybe not, but Ledger has become something of a punchline--if only to his close friends. "You should hear the f---ing messages I have on my answering machine," he groans. "'You gonna rock me, man?' I'm just getting so much f---ing flak from them, it's not funny." (One can only imagine the ribbing had he accepted that Spider-Man role.)

Perhaps to avoid such pigeonholing, Ledger's follow-up projects will veer far away from teen territory. In Four Feathers (based on the same book as the 1939 film), from Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur, he plays a British military officer who is viewed as a coward when he resigns before a battle. "It's deep, deep, deep," says the actor. "It's not a movie that teenagers are supposed to come in and understand. It's, like, beyond that." As Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein, who's one of Four Feathers' producers, puts it, "This is 'Say goodbye to your one-minute moment of Heath Ledger, Teen Idol.' He wanted to lose that image and take on a tougher role." Later this month, the actor will head to Louisiana for two weeks of shooting opposite Billy Bob Thornton in Monsters Ball, the story of a father and son who work on death row.

As promising as Ledger's career looks now, there was a time when Hollywood didn't consider him the next big thing. A few years ago, Weinstein, who has made a career out of nurturing young talent like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, rejected Ledger for a lead role in a still-uncast European soccer flick called Calcio. "Oh yeah, isn't that ironic?" Ledger says with a grin. "Thanks, Harvey!" Both parties admit they needed to clear the air before shooting began on Four Feathers. "He joked about it in his kind of passive-aggressive way," says Ledger. Weinstein cracks, "I said, 'I don't even know whether I saw [your screen test] or not; that's how good you were, Heath!'....He's brilliant in all his movies," Weinstein adds quickly, "but even he admits he's not the best at auditions."

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