Michelle Williams Backed Out of Movie Inspired By Heath Ledger’s Death

Reopening previous wounds. Michelle Williams‘ real-life tragedy with Heath Ledger impressed the film Blood, however she determined she couldn’t play the main woman within the Sundance Movie Competition award winner.

Blood, directed by Bradley Rust Grey, follows Chloe (Carla Juri), a younger widow who travels to Japan after her husband’s loss of life. She reconnects with previous buddy, Toshi (Takashi Ueno), however she struggles with feeling like she’s falling in love once more.

Grey defined that he’s mates with Williams, 41, and the movie was impressed by her expertise dealing with grief after Ledger’s loss of life. The 2 began relationship in 2004 after enjoying husband and wife in Brokeback Mountain. The costars welcomed daughter Matilda, now 16, the next yr.

Ledger and Williams cut up in 2007, simply months earlier than Ledger died of an unintentional overdose in January 2008. He was 28 years previous.

Whereas at Sundance, the place Blood debuted earlier this month, Bradley defined that he began creating the script with Williams as his collaborator, and the concept was that she’d play the grieving widow.

“We each shared this weight, of loss of life, and the sensation that you just at all times carry that weight when anyone near you dies,” Bradley shared by way of Leisure Weekly. “Once we have been on the point of shoot the movie, she realized it was all slightly too shut for her nonetheless, and he or she politely bowed out.”

Williams — who married Hamilton director Thomas Kail in March 2020 and welcomed her second youngster the next June — has overtly talked concerning the grieving course of and the way Ledger’s passing modified her life.

“Now, my life, our life, has a type of repaired itself. [Ledger’s death has] modified how I see the world and the way I work together every day,” she instructed Vogue in September 2011. “It’s modified the father or mother I’m. It’s modified the buddy I’m. It’s modified the type of work that I actually need to do. It’s change into the lens via which I see life — that it’s all impermanent.”

Although she opted out of the movie, Grey stays grateful to Williams, who got here up with the title in a dream and helped him discover the story he wished to inform.

“It took me a very long time to jot down the script as a result of she’s such a transformative actress and after some time I assumed, what we shared in frequent was the sense of loss, [which] she was going via that at the moment of her life,” he instructed The Moveable Feast through the January pageant. “However when it obtained nearer, it was slightly too shut, and it was really okay as a result of it opened the movie then to be slightly bit extra common. It will’ve been actually attention-grabbing to do a movie together with her about that, however, in a manner, she was like a bridge. … In a manner I feel I wouldn’t have developed this story [without her].”

Blood received the U.S. Dramatic Particular Jury Award for Uncompromising Inventive Imaginative and prescient at Sundance.

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