At a Jan. 4 Palm Springs film fest Q&A, Ethan Hawke said the ‘Blue Moon’ director told hm he was too hot to play this character — until he wasn’t.
Ethan Hawke reflects on his career at the Palm Springs Film Awards
Ethan Hawke received the Career Achievement Award at the Palm Springs International Film Awards.
The morning after receiving the Career Achievement Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Ethan Hawke showed a screening of his evocative new movie “Blue Moon” and did a Q&A interview beforehand.
Hawke, wearing casual attire and a baseball cap, regaled the crowd at Palm Springs High School with stories about the film, the ninth of his career with director and friend Richard Linklater, who also directed Hawke in films like “Boyhood” and the “Before” trilogy.
He said the two had the idea for the film about real-life lyricist Lorenz Hart almost 12 years ago, but the timing wasn’t quite right. Linklater had shared this dialogue-heavy short story written by Robert Kaplow with Hawke and asked him what he thought about it.
“I told him ‘I think this is a Richard Linklater film …. and I think it stars me,'” Hawke said wanting the juicy role of Hart, a 4-foot-10, balding, 48-year-old mess of a man who was famous in the 1930s and 40s. “But he said, ‘No, no you can’t play that part.’ I asked him why not and he said ‘You really want to know? You’re not right for this part because well … it’s because women still want to sleep with you.'”
This was in 2013, and Hawke accepted the idea that maybe he was too handsome and desirable to play the role and the two decided to table the idea while still working with the text here and there over the next four or five years and making it better and better. Then, about two years ago in early 2024, Hawke made an appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.”
He got a call from Linklater the next morning.
“He said he saw me on the ‘Jimmy Fallon’ show and I said ‘Oh yeah. How did I do?’ and he said ‘You did fine, but you know what? I think you’re ready for that (Lorenz Hart) role.” The Palm Springs crowd roared with laughter and Hawke tied a bow on the anecdote. “And I said ‘(Expletive) you! And let’s make the movie.'”
The role is a heavy lift as the entire 100-minute movie is basically one long conversation with Hart holding court in a bar in New York City in the 1940s. He slowly unravels as he comes to grips with the fact that his career is all but over as his writing partner, Richard Rodgers, had to move on from Hart due to Hart’s drunkenness and instead teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein. The movie takes place on the night that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first play “Oklahoma!” debuts. It’s a hit, thus cementing Hart’s career demise.
Despite being a dozen years in the making, Hawke drew gasps from the crowd when he revealed that they shot the entire movie — which also stars Bobby Cannavale as the bartender, Andrew Scott as Rodgers and Margaret Qualley as a young ingenue — in just 15 days.
Hawke said the movie is meant to be a bookend companion piece with a different film that Linklater released in 2025 called “Nouvelle Vague” which is about the excitement of the beginning of a career, that of French director Jean-Luc Godard.
Hawke was asked if he finds it more difficult to play roles that are based on actual people vs. made-up characters. He said that stepping into the world of Hart was kind of in the sweet spot between the two. He explained.
“Playing a real person is difficult if the audience is really aware of how the person acts,” Hawke explained. “To see Joaquin Phoenix play Johnny Cash, that’s tough because we all have an idea of how Johnny Cash is. But playing Hart was nice because I have all these details about his life, but the audience isn’t burdened with knowledge to say ‘That’s not how he talks’ or ‘He doesn’t move his hands that way.’ So it’s really the best of both worlds. But if I want to know what his favorite color is, I can found out, if I want to know what year in his life he was afraid of dogs, I can find out. I don’t have to build a backstory.”
Hawke said he disagrees with the notion that “Blue Moon” is somewhat like a play because it takes place in one location and is dialogue-driven.
“People say that, and I think it’s because the artform of theater uses language a lot more than contemporary movies, which are not interested in the language as much,” Hawke said. “But I think what (Linklater) does is really honor the language but also make it deeply cinematic. He knows that they need each other. He understands the architecture of cinema. It’s not art alone, it’s not fantastic dialogue alone, it’s both. What a play can not do as well as a movie is really invite you to be in a bar in 1943. It’s just not the same in that way.”
Hawke said he knows he’s been lucky in his career to have been in such a variety of successful films and worked with so many talented actors and directors. But he did have one difficult-to-follow piece of advice for aspiring actors.
“It doesn’t hurt to have a best friend who’s also a world-class filmmaker,” he said with a smile.
Missed it at Palm Springs Film Festival 2026? Here’s how to watch ‘Blue Moon’
Streaming: The only way to see “Blue Moon,” which only had the one screening at the film festival, is on streaming services as it only had a limited theatrical release back in October. The movie is available to rent from streamers like Amazon Video and Apple TV.
