Many years after the passing of Heath Ledger, who died in 2008 of an accidental drug overdose, his ex-girlfriend Michelle Williams opened up about th
Many years after the passing of Heath Ledger, who died in 2008 of an accidental drug overdose, his ex-girlfriend Michelle Williams opened up about their bond during an episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, hosted by Dax Shepard.
Shepard, too, knew Ledger a bit, he told his guest. “I feel obligated to say that I knew him a little bit when he was getting sober,” Shepard said. “And I don’t know that I’ve ever fallen in love with someone so quickly. This is one of the most special boys I’ve ever met. And I can feel the weight of the world on him in a very special way that kind of broke my heart.”
Williams replied, in a whisper, that Ledger was “so special,” repeating it a few times. “Thank God there’s Matilda,” she added, referring to her and Ledger’s now 19-year-old daughter.
Williams and Ledger met on the set of Brokeback Mountain, where they played a married couple grappling with an enormous secret: Ledger’s character, Ennis, was hiding his homosexuality, and his relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack, who in turn was married to Anne Hathaway‘s Lureen. Matilda Rose Ledger was born during the film’s promotional tour, in October 2005.
As Shepard pointed out, everyone in Brokeback‘s cast went on to enormous fame and accolades. “How was the life-altering shift of, you’re going to be at the Academy Awards?” he asked Williams “Was that a natural transition?”
“No,” replied Williams. “We had a baby. But I suppose maybe it’s a good thing about being young, is that you don’t have so much life experience that you can contextualize things. So you’re really just going with the flow.”
Williams and Ledger broke up 12 months before Ledger’s death. Williams raised Matilda on her own for several years. She’s now a parent to three more kids with her husband, director Thomas Kail: Hart, born in 2020; a second child, born in 2022; and a third born in the spring of 2025. As such, Williams has gradually become more confident in her abilities as a mother. “When I make mistakes in front of my daughter, and own up to them and apologize, it teaches her to make mistakes and say, ‘oopsie, Mommy, I’m sorry.’ And it’s not a big deal,” she told Shepard. “It’s a part of life, and we move on. No shame, no blame. Just, ‘You made a mistake? Beautiful. I made five already today.’”
Back in 2016, in an interview with Porter magazine, Williams talked about her experience as a single mother after Ledger’s death. “In all honesty, for pretty much everything else, I feel like I’m a believer in not fighting circumstances, accepting where you are and where you’ve been,” she said then. “In pretty much all senses but one, I would be able to go totally down that line of thinking were it not for Matilda not having her dad. You know, that’s just something that doesn’t . . . I mean, it just won’t ever be right.”
Original story in VF Italy.
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