Paul Bettany says he is still ‘overwhelmed with sadness’ over Heath Ledger's death

Paul Bettany has opened up about how he still feels "overwhelmed with sadness" when he thinks about the late Heath Ledger.

The 55-year-old actor's A Knight's Tale co-star died from an accidental overdose in 2008 aged just 28, and the WandaVision actor is still "mourning" the loss of his friend and the creative output he had to offer the world.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said, “Whenever I think about him, I find myself sort of overwhelmed with sadness when I have to remember that he's dead.”

"He was an incredibly creative force and I find myself mourning the things that he didn't make, not just as an actor, he was just an incredibly creative human being,” Paul added.

Paul thinks Heath is often misremembered as a serious person, with host Josh Horowitz referencing how he is referred to as a "tortured genius king of thing" and the Wimbledon star insisting his late friend "just wasn't like that."

He said, “I've said this before, I think these sort of narratives and almost an industry gets built around the narrative of him...”

“He was just shining and when you were with him, it was like having the sun on you. He was just so full of life and joy, and the kid couldn't sleep, and that's it. That's the story. A fantastic actor,” Paul further explained.

He also previously admitted he "can't remember" any of the dialogue from 2001’s A Knight's Tale, in which he portrayed poet Geoffrey Chaucer opposite the Brokeback Mountain star as William Thatcher, because he has only seen it once as he couldn't bear to watch it back after Heath died.

During an appearance at LA Comic Con last year, at which Paul took part in a Q+A with his WandaVision co-star Elizabeth Olsen, he was asked if fans ever approach him and ask him to repeat any of his iconic lines from A Knight's Tale.

He replied, “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. 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,” Paul Bettany concluded as he expressed how much he still misses Heath Ledger.