I think I speak for all the Scanner bloggers, when I say we're really torn up over the untimely death of Heath Ledger. It's always sad when someone so young and talented dies, but something about Heath made him seem like he was 'one of us.' Maybe it was the fact that, for a while, he chose to live in Brooklyn, where Scanner Bryan saw him on the street and Scanner Emily would walk past his house every day on her way home from the subway, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ledger with then fiancee Michelle Williams and their daughter Matilda.
A tragic surprise and terrible cliche, the young actor's body was found next to a bottle of sleeping pills yesterday afternoon. It's still undetermined whether the pills are what killed him, and whether his death was intentional.
Ledger had just wrapped "The Dark Knight," the new Batman Movie in which he played The Joker, and was in the midst of filming a movie with Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits when he died. A ridiculously talented actor, Ledger could play an asshole, a charmer, a gay cowboy, and an incarnation of Bob Dylan. We all wanted to see him do more. But I'll choose to remember him how I saw him when I first really fell in love with him, dancing uncomfortably to Bowie. Maybe a lame tribute to a great guy, but a tribute nonetheless:
Our thoughts are with his friends and family, who knew the real Heath Ledger, beyond the characters he played and public appearances he made. He seemed like a really great guy who was just going through some shit. And it's really fucking sad.
[Yesterday: Heath Ledger Dead in Likely Overdose]
[Image via The New York Times]