Paul Bettany has admitted he hasn’t watched his breakthrough film A Knight’s Tale since it was first released because he misses late co-star Heath Ledger “too much”.
The WandaVision and Avengers star played English poet and writer Geoffrey Chaucer in the medieval 2001 action-comedy, which starred Ledger as William Thatcher, a peasant squire, fuelled by his desire for food and glory, who forges a new identity for himself as a knight when his master dies.
Ledger went on to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in Brokeback Mountain in 2005 and he played the iconic Batman villain The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 blockbuster The Dark Knight. The actor died in January the same year, four months before the release of the film, after overdosing on prescription drugs. He was 28 years-old.
The late actor received a posthumous Oscar for his role in the film.
Speaking in a Q&A during an appearance over the weekend at the LA Comic Con, when asked if fans ever ask him to repeat some of his iconic lines from A Knight’s Tale, Bettany said: “It was a really long time ago. It was like another lifetime ago. And people do come up sometimes, people come up to me on the street and quote things at me, and I literally can’t remember. I can’t remember any of it.”
He added: “I saw [the film] when it first came out. I’ve never seen it again since. There are lots of reasons for that, and just one of them is that I miss Heath too much.”
Elsewhere, it was recently confirmed that Bettany is set to return as Marvel Studios’ Vision in the forthcoming Disney+ series Vision Quest, which is set for release in 2026.
Bettany last played Vision in the 2021 Disney+ series WandaVision, where the character was resurrected and revamped into White Vision following his death in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War.