10 Things To Like About Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger bounds across the hotel room with the energy of a young kangaroo.

The 22-year-old actor has been sitting way too long on the couch, talking way too much to reporters asking him about his new movie "A Knight's Tale," and about his girlfriend Heather Graham, and about his status as a sex symbol from Down Under.

So, I tell him I won't ask him anything about Heather Graham or his status as a sex symbol from Down Under. I instantly become the actor's new best pal.

"Excellent," Ledger says in his meltaway Aussie accent. "I'm loving it!"

In a cotton pullover, tattered jeans and running shoes, Ledger has a personality to match his clothes - casual and unpretentious. He is still in that giddy state of wonder that up-and-coming actors experience before the rush of media attention becomes boring and bothersome.

For the star of "10 Things I Hate About You" (a high-school reworking of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew") and "The Patriot" (he played Mel Gibson's son), all this press attention is still new and exciting.

It must have rubbed off, because I came from our brief chat in Chicago with 10 Things I Like About Heath.

1. He likes the Mel Method of dealing with life, work and fans.

"He doesn't take anything seriously, especially himself," Ledger said. "He doesn't look at himself as Mel Gibson. He's genuine and has a smile all the time. He's polite to everyone. I really respect that. I never thought, 'Oh, now I see how I should act.' I've always been that way before. It was just good to know that someone like that is doing it, especially someone in his position. He's a rarity."

2. He pays attention.

"I learned a lot from him (Gibson) on the set of 'The Patriot.' But he never patronized me by sitting down with me and telling me what he does and what I should do. It was up to me to learn from him rather than being taught. You have to be smart enough to know that you can learn a lot by observing people, and I learned a lot."

3. He's a dancer and proud of it.

"I took a contemporary dance class with interpretive dance and tribal dance, some of the stuff the aborigines developed. When I started acting on stage, I was very self-conscious about my body, where my hands were. I wanted to be comfortable with the movement of my body. So I did dance for a couple of years. It certainly helps in terms of your self-confidence to just get up there and do it."

4. He doesn't want to do dreck.

"Right after '10 Things,' I turned down lots of projects where I played another high-school student. In Hollywood, they see you do a certain kind of role, and they take the low risk by asking you do it again and again. You have to make the decisions about what your career will be. I had to stay strong at that. I had to stay true to my instincts."

5. He knows his limitations.

"I had to turn down roles that were good roles in good movies because I felt that maybe I just wasn't ready to do it. You have to be smart enough to know what you can't do, because everyone around says you can do anything. But, hey, this character is 30 years old and has four kids! And people will look at you and say, 'We can make it work!'"

6. He recognizes the price of fame.

"That would be on the social side. It's being self-aware all of a sudden. You go out and you're aware in your peripheral vision of these muffled comments, these stares. You can't help but be self- conscious. You can't even pick up a glass without being self- conscious. You lose privacy."

7. He chose drama over sports in high school, even though he was good at athletics.

"Sports was never going to be a profession for me. Sports was something I had to do at school. I really just dropped it when I could."

8. He's introspective.

"I've found the qualities I share with my father and the qualities I share with my mother. Basically, your parents are blueprints for what you have inside you. Then you have an extra 20 percent that is exclusive to you. I realized that at an early age and I analyzed that to shreds. I learned from their mistakes. That was the key to helping me understand who I was."

9. He inspires loyalty.

"I definitely have friends who would take up a baseball bat for me. And I would do the same for them in a heartbeat, no matter where I was."

10. He left home at 17 because a Heath's gotta do what a Heath's gotta do.

"If I wanted to portray people in this craft, I had to know how to portray myself, I had to know who I was. I had to have understanding of pain, love and pain from love. So, I had this idea to just jump in a car and hit the road. So I did that at 17. I'm still on that journey. It's a tribal thing, it's a walkabout."