Andrew Garfield Says Heath Ledger Predicted ‘The Dark Knight’ Success: “He Was So Smug About It”

Heath Ledger predicted the success of The Dark Knight before his death, Andrew Garfield shared this week.

Garfield said during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he and the late actor crossed paths shortly after Ledger finished filming Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

“He was so smug about it,” Garfield said of Ledger talking about his time on Nolan’s set. “I was like, ‘How did that go?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’”

Ledger died at age 28 of an accidental drug overdose about six months before the release of The Dark Knight, but his predictive powers turned out to be true: The film broke several box office records, and the Joker star earned a posthumous Oscar for best supporting actor.

Though Garfield’s time interacting with Ledger was brief — the two worked together on 2009’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus — the Social Network star says he still thinks of Ledger and all the actor taught him.

“I remember his like, Empire magazine cover came out and he was like, ‘Oh, they used a fucking shit photo,’” Garfield said. “And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, dude that looks fucking incredible.’ And he was like, ‘Nah, the pose is all wrong, it looks kinda like a conventional version of what an actor…you’ll see.’ And yeah, I did see.”

Garfield also shared that Ledger once gifted him a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses that he had complimented, which he still has. “He was just a very generous, beautiful, creative spirit,” he said. “He was a kind of beacon, it was like a wild animal.”

The Amazing Spider-Man star continued, “He was so free and so wild and so, kind of dangerous on set in a way that was the kind of thing that is inspiring and spontaneous. He would say before every take, or one take every scene, ‘Let’s have some fun with this one.’”

Garfield’s appreciation of remaining spontaneous lives on in his approach to acting today — he recently lamented to IndieWire that “we are much less intimate with ourselves, and we’re much less intimate with death. Our feelings. Reality. Actually, we’re much less intimate with reality. There’s such a kind of dividedness around how we experience the world now, and I think it feels like this is a film filled with longing in that way.”

The lack of connection, Garfield added, had led to a change in the depiction of sex and intimacy in film, which he hopes his new movie We Live In Time will change.

“I think maybe this film feels from a different era because we are far more guarded with each other now,” Garfield continued. “Paranoid. Removed. Isolated. Divided. There’s far less intimacy because of this stuff.”

He continued, “I think there’s either an unconscious or even conscious longing in the audience for these images. To see that level of intimacy and connection being lived out on screen, I think, will be a lovely reminder and inspiration for people.”

We Live in Time hits theaters Oct. 18.