Career: Australian director Gregor Jordan auditioned him for the lead in Two Hands (1999), which he got. An in-your-face Aussie crime thriller, the film was outstanding and helped him secure a role in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). After that, Heath feared being typecast as a teen hunk so he accepted a role in Mel Gibson historical war drama The Patriot (2000). He followed that with roles in the hugely popular A Knight's Tale (2001), the dark drama Monster's Ball (2001) and fantasy thriller The Brothers Grimm (2005). He won critical acclaim for his role as a conflicted gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain (2005) and the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), for which he won a posthumous Oscar. He died on January 22, 2008, at the age of 28.

Career: Stiles had small roles in The Devil's Own (1997) and Wide Awake (1998) and her first lead came in Wicked (1998). Her interest in Shakespeare was rewarded when she starred in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), which was based on The Taming of the Shrew, an updated version of Hamlet (2000) and a film based on Othello entitled O (2001). A year later, Stiles portrayed Viola in an off-Broadway production of Twelfth Night. She took a break from acting to study at Columbia University. Other film credits include three Bourne films alongside Matt Damon, Mona Lisa Smile (2003), The Omen (2006), Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and a recurring role on Dexter. In 2012, she played the lead role in web series Blue.

Career: At the age of six, he began his acting career and appeared in a number of TV movies during the late 1980s. In 1991, he received his first major role in the short-lived Dark Shadows, before 3rd Rock from the Sun made him a household name five years later. A shining performance in modern-day Shakespeare adaptation 10 Things I Hate About You, revealed that he was a talented actor who could fly outside the confines of a sitcom. In the early noughties, Gordon-Levitt began to explore darker indie territory with Manic (2001), before turning his back on acting to go to university. Three years later he was pulled back from his self-imposed exile, and began to make a name for himself as a credible actor with a number of strange, obscure indie roles - in Mysterious Skin (2004) he played a gay prostitute. Gordon-Levitt wasn't a man out to make a quick buck - he hand-picked his projects on their creative merits - and this paid dividends in 2009 with (500) Days of Summer, which showed he was the quintessential alternative leading male. His recent credits include Inception, 50/50, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Lincoln and Don Jon.