Paul Bettany Reveals Why He Hasn’t Watched ‘A Knight’s Tale’ Since Its 2001 Release

Paul Bettany has an emotional relationship to A Knight’s Tale.

Bettany, 54, appeared at L.A. Comic Con at the LA Convention Center in Downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, Sept. 27 and took part in a Q&A with his WandaVision and The Avengers costar Elizabeth Olsen. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Bettany plays Vision, a humanoid robot, while Olsen plays Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. The Scarlet Witch. Bettany will reprise his role in the upcoming miniseries Vision Quest. 

But one of the audience members had a question about one of Bettany’s earliest projects, A Knight’s Tale. The 2001 film was Bettany’s first Hollywood production, and helped boost his career. The movie was set in medieval times, and blended action, comedy and modern pop culture. Bettany played the historical figure, Geoffrey Chaucer.

The audience member asked if fans ever ask Bettany to repeat some of his most famous lines from the film, which also starred Heath Ledger, Mark Addy, Rufus Sewell, Shannyn Sossamon, Alan Tudyk and Laura Fraser. 

“It was a really long time ago,” Bettany admitted. “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.”

The actor continued, “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.”

Ledger died in 2008 at age 28. In A Knight’s Tale, he played William Thatcher, a peasant and squire who adopts the armor of his knight when he dies. Bettany’s Chaucer forges documents that allow Thatcher to pretend he’s noble, and he ends up helping William in his quest for victory. 

Bettany told Vulture in 2021 that he agreed to do the movie because, “having a job was appealing to me! I was just trying to pay my rent at that point in my life and just get experience.”

“. . . [I loved] being in front of movie cameras, and I loved everything about being on a set, and I had a sort of voracious appetite for knowledge about how it’s done. And so I was just excited to go and play in another movie,” he explained. As for playing a character based on a real person, he did no research. “I was just sort of making it up as I went along,” he said.

Of Ledger, who had already found success with 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You, Bettany said, “I can tell you that he just had a light that shined off him. He was a movie star, you know? Just immediately, you met him, and he shone, as you lot say, and it was very hard not to fall in love with him — I think for anybody. He was a very playful, joyous spirit.”

In December 2021, Bettany told The Independent that he’s “filled with absolute self-doubt,” and has been since before he worked on A Knight’s Tale. He saw Ledger as having lots of self-belief.

“So much has been spoken about Heath’s darkness but I only saw this person who was so full of light and had this confidence in himself that was magnetic but never felt obnoxious,” he said.