(Credits: Far Out / Bryan Berlin)
Wed 7 January 2026 11:00, UK
It’s hard not to love Ethan Hawke, especially in this phase of his career.
Just watch him go full weird uncle mode while denouncing AI in a theatre somewhere and try not to fall madly in love. He is a celebrity at its finest – taking risks in front of the camera, standing up for all things decent off camera.
The rest of his career hasn’t been too shabby either. Denouncing the well-trodden path of the young heartthrob early in his Hollywood journey, he still managed to anchor one of the greatest cinematic romances of all time in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Elsewhere in the 1990s and early 2000s, he rolled the dice with a modern-day adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, a modern-day adaptation of Hamlet, and the Oscar-winning crime thriller Training Day with Denzel Washington.
But it’s his recent career that has really been an unpredictable joy to watch. He’s done some horror, some mumblecore, and some biopics, and he’s also thrown a few directorial efforts into the mix. It seems that, at this stage, Hawke is open to just about everything, and we’re all lucky to be witnesses.
This isn’t just an externally-applied narrative, either, because the actor himself is fully aware of this season of his career, and he’s consciously taking full advantage, and according to him, it all started in 2012 with the movie Sinister.
Directed by Scott Derrickson, it follows a writer, played by Hawke, who discovers a trove of snuff films depicting real-life crimes that happened in his new home, and while it’s no masterpiece, it did set the actor on a new trajectory. After decades of carving his own path in the industry, he was ready to revel in clichés.
“I always say that’s the start of the second half of my career,” he said of Sinister in an interview with ScreenDaily in 2025. “I felt reborn with that movie because it was going back to genre filmmaking.”
He recalled his first acting mentor, the Gremlins director Joe Dante, who directed him in 1985’s Explorers. Dante loved horror movies, Hawke explained, and said that it inspired him to see the acting potential within the genre constraints.
He’s certainly continued to do this, and in fact, horror has become something of a speciality for Hawke, because he’s even gotten to play the villain a time or two, like the 2021 Blumhouse movie The Black Phone, for example, saw him playing a serial killer known for snatching and murdering children. He played the part with so much terrifying zeal that you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a totally different Ethan Hawke from the one who starred in the Before trilogy.
These days, he’s a genuine character actor, which is pretty impressive considering that most of his contemporaries are still clinging to leading man roles with younger and younger co-stars. Say what you will about the quality of most horror movies and biopics, but if they can continue offering Hawke the chance to be a new iteration of himself on screen, keep them coming.
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