Stephen Gaghan Reveals New Details About Heath Ledger’s Death and Devastating Call: “It’s Still Sad”

Malcolm Gladwell‘s Revisionist History podcast launched a new limited series today titled Development Hell that offers deep dives into Hollywood projects that never made it on screens big or small. The New York Times best-selling author — who serves as co-founder of audio content company Pushkin Industries, home to his podcast — kicked off the series by investigating one of his own, an adaptation of his second book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, with Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan.

The longer than 40-minute conversation offers new details about their partnership and strategy in adapting the 2005 book about instincts, snap judgments and first impressions. But the chat took a devastating turn when Gaghan revealed why, after years of development and a package that once included A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio, he let go of it for good following the tragic death of Heath Ledger.

Ledger was found dead inside a Manhattan apartment on Jan. 22, 2008. His death was ruled accidental and attributed to a lethal mix of prescription medications including OxyContin, Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, Unisom and Restoril. It was also reported that when a housekeeper discovered Ledger unresponsive that day, Gladwell’s book was on Ledger’s nightstand and a draft of Gaghan’s screenplay was next to him in bed.

The podcast interview marks the first time Gaghan has spoken about what happened that day and the emotional phone call he received from Ledger’s father, Kim, once he arrived on scene along with a close friend of the actor. “They were there with the body and our script was in bed with him, and your book was on the bedside table. I think my number was on the script, like written. These guys, as you can imagine, they are in shock and they dialed that number and I don’t know why.”

Gaghan continued: “I’m in an airport with my wife [Minnie Mortimer] just going from one place to another, and I literally just collapse, never happened to me before or since. My feet went out from under me. I just literally sat down because I was like, ‘What?’ The emotion, what they were going through, I should not have been a party to in any way really, and yet as a human or as somebody who just cares, I just was there and I was listening and my wife was looking at me. I remember her face and I was just like, I was speechless. I just listened and listened and listened. It was just really, really sad. And it’s still sad. For me, I just had to put a pin in it.”

Before he shared the anecdote, Gaghan revealed how the script got to Ledger in the first place. Gaghan and Gladwell worked on hashing out the script by zeroing in on one specific chapter in Gladwell’s book. They put a package together that included DiCaprio, who had also signed on to produce the project. They took it on a tour of Hollywood studios to generate interest and a bidding war ensued.

“The town went nuts,” Gladwell says of the scene that went down in November 2005. “We pick a studio, we huddle with our agents, we pick a winner, checks are cashed. Some brilliant producer is assigned to our case, and off we go. Only it never happens. A year passes, then two years, then three years. And this is why we’re doing Development Hell, an entire series devoted to scripts that never happen. This is always the most devastating part of the story, the plot twists that happen off the page.”

Blink ended up at Universal and Gaghan said at one point they were ready to roll with a budget, a schedule and “essentially a green light” with Gaghan directing from his own script. “I said, ‘I’m going to do a week more on the script. There were just some things I wanted to fix. And I got into it and ended up working on it for months and months and I changed a lot of stuff. But the main thing I did, the character and a lot of this is just intuitive. I don’t even know why I’m doing it, but the character got 10 years younger. Leo, when he read it, he was really funny, he was like, ‘He goes, ‘Buddy, buddy, if you didn’t want me in the movie, all you had to do was say so. It’s no big deal.'”

Gaghan said it wasn’t so much that he didn’t want DiCaprio, but he had become close to Ledger. “I’d gotten to be very, very close with him instantly. I just had a real connection with him that was kind of unusual and really special to me. I got really excited and I started seeing him as the main character. Once I started seeing that I couldn’t unsee it, and obviously it was very delicate in a way. Leo’s totally cool. I mean, obviously, he has a thousand choices, but in my mind it was a big deal.”

Gaghan had become so close to Ledger that he “had a feeling they were going to make a bunch of movies together,” adding, “I love this guy.” Though Blink didn’t happen at the time, revisiting the script for the Gladwell chat brought a new revelation. “I got it out right before we got on, I was reading it, I was just like, I ran to find my wife, that we’re still married, thank goodness. And I was like, ‘I could be crazy but I think this script is really good.’ We really had something really special and we might’ve been ahead of our time or something,” he says.

Adds Gladwell: “Maybe it’s time to bring Blink back to life? If there’s someone listening in some big office somewhere in Hollywood, I will get on a plane tomorrow if that’s what it takes.”

Gladwell’s other conversations for Development Hell feature Hollywood writers and directors including Cameron Crowe, Susannah Grant, Gary Goldman, Charles Randolph and Neil LaBute about lost projects with the likes of Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bradley Cooper, Taika Waititi, Ralph Fiennes and Anjelica Huston.