Verne Troyer spoke to E! News about the sex tape his ex girlfriend has been shopping around. He’s been fighting its release and says his lawyer is great but it’s been expensive for him. Verne says that he broke up with Ranae Shrider right before she decided to go public with the tape and he suggests she’s doing it for revenge. He also confirms that they’re still living together and says that Ranae was just taunting him the other day. The story she told News of The World about having to rescue him after he nearly drowned in a bubble bath is false according to Verne.

“I feel like I have no privacy. Just because people are seeing something that was meant to be between me and her. That’s the biggest reason that I’m, you know, trying to stop the tape from being released.”

The diminutive actor says he feels “betrayed and hurt” by the release of the tape, and he denies all involvement in its release. Troyer and his attorney Edwin McPherson succeeded last week in upholding an injunction to prevent the sale of the tape while they try to shelve the issue entirely.

“I’ve been, for the past two weeks, three weeks probably, spending a lot of money to fight this. I have my lawyer and he’s doing a great job,” Troyer said…

“I broke up with her in the middle of June; it was something probably to do with that. It was basically when she decided to give the tape away. I highly doubt that she thought that would get me back with her. Ransom or something,” Troyer said.

And what of claims made by Shrider, like that she nearly drowned the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me star in a romantic bubble bath?

“There’s no incident like that. She’s coming up with things and telling media anything to make it interesting. I haven’t seen everything she’s done…The things she says just aren’t true,” he adds…

“She’s still in the house,” Troyer says, noting that he’s taking legal action to force her out, but their situation “makes it even harder, to, you know, not strangle her…

“I saw her when I left today and she was calling me names and stuff. Uh, so I can’t get away from it,” he said, choking back tears.

Troyer says friends, family and attorney are helping him pull through the mess, but that the embarrassment “has already started affecting [work opportunities].”

[From E-Online]

You can tell the guy was really betrayed by this woman and that he’s hurt by it. He’s not my favorite person and I didn’t like the way he behaved on The Surreal Life, but no one deserves to go through that.

Troyer also talks about Heath Ledger’s death. He worked closely with Heath on his last movie, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Troyer confirms statements from other cast members that it was a difficult shoot and that it was cold and a lot of the actors were sick from filming. He says Heath was troubled in his personal life, he’s not going to say exactly what it was about because he doesn’t want to betray their friendship, but that his death was an accident and Heath wasn’t about to take his own life. He told a funny story about how Heath taunted a paparazzo that was trying to shoot him.

Verne and other cast members have the same heart tattoo for Heath. It’s of a drawing the late actor made.

“I don’t believe that he was troubled,” Troyer says of Ledger’s final days working on the movie. “Everyone knew that he had a hard time sleeping and from working in the cold weather in London—we were out in the rain and things like that—so everybody got sick, to a certain extent…

“He couldn’t sleep because he was so wrapped up in the character of Joker in Batman,” Troyer said. “He was still going through not sleeping because he was so involved in that. Throughout our shoot it was the same way.”

Troyer insists that despite sleeplessness Ledger was still “upbeat” about his work on Parnassus. Playful even, as Troyer recalls the last time he and Ledger were together: On the cast’s final night of shooting before they departed London for hiatus, the pair shot a scene at a bar where paparazzi loomed out front. Ledger made his way into the crowd unseen to tease the shutterbugs.

“Heath snuck his way out into the crowd without anybody noticing and came right up next to one of the photographers and asked him, ‘Who are you trying to shoot? Who are you trying to get?’”

The photog said he wanted a snap of Ledger, to which Ledger responded, “’Oh, really? That’s cool,’” according to Troyer. By the time the pap could realize it was Heath himself, the actor had disappeared.

“I thought that was classic, just classic and hilarious,” Troyer said.

Troyer, who was visibly choked up during our sit-down with him, said he valued Heath’s confidence in him.

“There were things in his life going on and I don’t want to say anything about it because it was personal and he trusted me…anybody would have been a little bit depressed [in Heath’s existing situation],” Troyer said

Troyer maintains, however, Ledger would never commit suicide.

“He wasn’t, for me, depressed enough to even think about taking his own life. It was an accident, it happened and it’s very unfortunate.”

On a brighter note, Verne and other castmates like Lily Cole were able to pay homage to their costar and friend. They tattooed themselves with replicas of a heart Ledger drew on a piece of paper. Troyer, who got his on his right hand, considers it a memorial.

“A lot of people from the cast and crew got a tattoo of it somewhere, of that heart, just thinking of Heath and respecting him.”

[From E! Online]

It’s surprising to hear that Verne knew Heath. He touched a lot of people and his accidental death was a real tragedy. Heath had a few tattoos himself and even had one for his daughter, Matilda. It was a heart with her name on it that he had done on his chest about a year before he died.

Heath Ledger is shown on 9/2/05 at the Venice Film Festival. Credit: Graffiti Press / PR Photos. Verne Troyer is shon on 6/3/08. Credit: Jody Cortes / WENN