At the same time, he knows what it’s like to be unsteadied by
professional disappointment – and, worse, to be toppled, outright, by
personal tragedy. In 2010, he lost his older brother Dan (“my best
friend”) in what he has previously described
as a “drug-related accident”. Gordon-Levitt’s grief is still real and
knotted up with all sorts of contradictory impulses, as he goes on to
explain. For now, he alludes to his brother in passing, telling me that
“wire-walking is a metaphor for just waking up in the morning and being alive.
Which sometimes feels impossible. Which sometimes feels meaningless. In
which it can sometimes be really hard to provide yourself with a good
answer to, ‘Why should I wake up and get out of bed? Why should I care?
Does this mean anything at all?’”[…]
Gordon-Levitt uploaded a message
to say he’d be taking a short break to grieve, but he added: “[Dan]
would absolutely positively insist that we not let this bad news deter
us on our collective mission.”
That word, “mission”, was selected with care, he tells me now. “It
was one of Dan’s favourite words. He would say it all the time,
sometimes with profundity, sometimes with perfect triviality. Like,
‘We’re going on an orange juice mission!’ That’s exactly how my brother
was.”
Gordon-Levitt’s demeanour when he talks about his brother is one of
halting animation. He leans forward on his elbows and speaks in excited
blasts, only to cut himself off and pause, looking off to the left or
right.
Not so long ago, he gave an interview to GQ in which the writer said
Dan had died “of an alleged drug overdose”. Gordon-Levitt posted a
message denying this overdose on Tumblr, describing it as “an irresponsible claim”.
(GQ stood by its story.) “I’ve had negative experiences in the past
talking to journalists about my brother,” he says, “and, I don’t know,
I’m hoping that you’re going to be considerate. Especially to my
parents, who are going to read this, because they’ve really been hurt in
the past. But I do want to talk about this, because, I guess, I trust
you, and also because, as I was grieving, I found it helpful to… I mean,
just reading different people talk about their grieving processes, it
helped.”
He says that not so long ago, while he was training with Petit, he
felt a potent reconnection with his brother. It was during one of those
sessions in which the actor was up on a 6ft-high wire in his invisible
harness. He was inching along, utterly terrified, “and halfway across, I
guess Philippe noticed that I was getting scared. He said one word:
‘Breathe’.” “Breathe” was another of his brother’s words. “Dan used to
say it all the time. Just that one word. It was the most powerful
moment, to be up there on the wire, and to have him say that very
thing.”
Was it a happy sensation, or a sad one? He pauses for a long time,
staring away. Finally, he says, “The grieving that I do for my brother,
it’s evolved over five years. I feel lucky to report that the grief,
now, is usually accompanied by some beauty. But the beauty, it’s
accompanied by more grief. Things have sort of become more nuanced. That
moment with Philippe, was there a sadness to it? Yes, it was deeply
painful. But that pain was sort of simultaneous to – and inseparable
from – a rare elation.”