Ethan Hawke is a little wired. It’s just after 9 a.m., we’re sitting on a West Hollywood restaurant patio, and he’s on his fourth cup of coffee. “You ever read a Harrison Ford interview? I watch him and I’m like, ‘How does he do that?’” Hawke says. “It’s like he’s writing his response in his head — deleting that one, writing another one. Then he comes out with it.” He smiles to himself. “I can’t do that. That ain’t me.”
For the last few months, Hawke has been asked to talk a whole lot. The Austin, Texas, native is winding down work on the campaign trail for Blue Moon, directed by his longtime collaborator Richard Linklater and featuring his most transformative performance on screen, as the alcoholic depressive songwriter Lorenz Hart. Hawke has already been nominated for the Golden Globe and Actor Awards — and should the Oscars follow suit, it’ll be his first ever Academy nod for a lead role. “It’s symbolic of 30 years of work to me, and it’s so different from anything I’ve ever done — but it uses pieces of everything that I’ve learned along the way,” Hawke says, reaching for the french press carafe. It’s the latest in a string of bold, distinctive star turns, which also includes the critically acclaimed shows The Good Lord Bird and The Lowdown and the Paul Schrader film First Reformed.
That movie, which found Hawke portraying a tormented priest, arguably ushered in this new career chapter — and fans were disappointed when he missed out on an Oscar nomination despite loads of precursor prizes. Hawke too looks back on that with some regret. “I didn’t do [the campaign] on First Reformed because I was doing a play, and I wasn’t going to drop out of the play — but all things being equal, when it was over, I thought it probably would’ve been great for the film if I had done it,” Hawke says. He acknowledges having felt some personal hesitancy: “First Reformed was hard to talk about: climate change, loss of faith in America — and it’s a Paul Schrader movie, so, does he blow himself up in the end?” (Schrader is known for a controversial sound bite every now and then.) “It was a hard one. It was not something you were dying to do interviews about.”
Blue Moon presented a simpler brief: It’s set in New York circa 1943 over one night at Sardi’s, imagining Hart drinking his pain away on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the new musical by his former partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). It’s the latest Linklater-Hawke teamup, a creative relationship that’s spanned more than three decades and resulted in multiple shared Oscar nominations for screenplays (on the Before movies). And in the nine years since First Reformed, the industry has changed in such a way that the future of independent American movies feels newly, intensely under threat. Getting out there to support Blue Moon seemed like a no-brainer.
“If you see this whole thing as an advertisement for our industry, then it starts to be fun — like, okay, let’s remind everybody that these movies are important and a relevant part of our culture,” Hawke says. “We want movies like Blue Moon for other people. If the people invested in Blue Moon make money off of it and it makes audiences happy, there’ll be more of them.”
Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon
Sony Pictures Classics
Hawke has received two acting Oscar nominations, for his supporting roles in 2001’s Training Day and 2015’s Boyhood. These were, he says, “the two time periods in my life where I very clearly felt people narrativizing my life as if something had changed — like, ‘Oh, now he’s back on track.’” When Training Day came out, he noticed coverage amounting to, “Wow, that’s what happened to the kid from Dead Poets Society, he’s a man now!” Boyhood was a stranger case, since it was shot in increments over 12 years, with Hawke and co-star Patricia Arquette’s careers and lives slowly changing in that time — only for the world to treat its release as an epic comeback for them both. “I remember reading articles about a Hawke-aissance or something. I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’”
Hawke explains, “This job that I’m in is a constant recontextualization, not for yourself, but for the people watching.” He’s noticed it happening again with Blue Moon and the buzz surrounding it — he’s also terrific in The Lowdown, which FX just renewed for a second season — but this time, sees a more natural turning point worth exploring and discussing. “I came out of the gate getting leading parts and that can breed a laziness about the actual methodology of acting,” Hawke says. “I was teaching myself to reboot the computer, from a leading man to a character actor, and thinking, ‘What if I could combine these things?’ If you don’t do that as you get older, you get a lot less opportunities. Very few people get to be Paul Newman.”
Blue Moon beautifully captures this new approach. “It’d be really cool to release the movie after having deleted the previous 30 years of my career,” Hawke says. We see that he is doing the “magic trick,” as he calls it, because we know him. We consider the audacity of the performance in the context of his decades spent on the big screen, typically in a more naturalistic key.
So how does Hawke look back on some of those demanding lead roles from earlier in his career, like Michael Almereyda’s remixed 2000 Hamlet? Hawke gives me a Harrison Ford-length pause — not out of nervousness, but genuine thought. That project, which interweaved Elizabethan dialogue with a contemporary setting, signaled another artistic pivot. “It’s just where my curiosity was really getting unlocked,” Hawke says. “I love that movie. Things that were modern when we did it are now retro, but it actually still functions.”
Generally, over time, Hawke has reframed some of his thinking on how his work will age. About 20 years ago, he was cast in the crime thriller Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what would be the final film of Sidney Lumet’s career before his death in 2011. He and Hoffman wanted the iconic Network and 12 Angry Men director to shoot on film, and didn’t understand why Lumet opted for digital. “Sidney said, ‘I get it. I get it — you wanted to have that Dog Day Afternoon look?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah!’” Hawke says. “He’s like, ‘Here’s the thing. I made every film I ever did as frugally as possible — if you wait 25 years, they’ve all got that great retro look.’” Hawke confirms: “What’s funny is I went to an anniversary screening — and it does look retro!”
The lesson speaks to Hawke’s philosophy on making popular art. “Peter Weir used to talk about how much he loved [Andrei] Tarkovsky, but he was like, ‘That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make popular art.’ And as a popular artist, I’m willing to play within the sandbox of commerciality.” Hawke had Black Phone 2 out in the same year as Blue Moon, and has been met with fans asking to sign merch for the horror film while promoting his little-indie-that-could. As he speaks about that balancing act, Hawke’s heart is clearly with the smaller stuff.
“There are a handful of people that make commercial art. Quentin, PTA, Ryan Coogler — it’s really good for all of us. If you look at Spielberg and Guillermo [del Toro], they’re these large trees in the forest, and they provide a lot of shade and a lot of health,” Hawke says. “But we need society, the culture, to make events out of small things and to help cultivate the undergrowth of the forest. The underbrush is getting thrashed and it’s so hard for a young sprout to find roots and have enough time to make enough art to grow.”
Richard Linklater and Hawke in 2004.
Amy Tierney/WireImage
This leads us to Hawke’s other “Harrison Ford pause” of the morning. Last week, he hyped the hell out of his next movie to be made with Linklater, a period piece decades in the making just as Blue Moon was, while on Today. He revealed it’ll go into production later this year and “will be among the greatest films ever made.” Given what Hawke had just told me about the state of indie movies, I wonder where the confidence in that timeline comes from.
“I don’t know why I said that,” he says. “I’m mad at myself. The problem with doing so many interviews is eventually you lose your mind. It’s like a guy who stayed at the party too long. You just talk too much.” Hawke then reiterates the movie will be made: “Rick will tell you, I feel this way about every movie we’ve ever done, but I’m very confident about this. Whenever we make it — and I think it will be this year — it’ll be the heaviest lift of our lives, but we’re really ready.”
Hawke also knows, however, that there are no sure bets in this world. A few years ago, he reunited with Almereyda to make the film Tesla, only for more than half of the movie’s budget to be slashed a week before production began. “The same thing that happened to Tesla could happen to us, and then you’re facing a decision: Do you march ahead at a fraction of the budget, or do you stop and try to re-raise it?” Hawke says. “I hate that it’s so much work. It’s so hard — Rick has to spend years raising the money to make the movie and trying to convince people that it’s going to be worthwhile, even though he’s never made a movie that wasn’t worthwhile.”
Why did Hawke pause with his answer here? “It’s balancing the gratitude for being in the game at all with the desire to want the best,” he explains. “I used to love John Sayles, and eventually it just got too difficult for him to raise money for movies, and we stopped getting John Sayles movies. That’s our community’s loss.”
There are moments when I can sense Hawke sounding run down by the state of things. At one point, he muses without an AI prompting, “When people start talking about AI, I really just want to go back to the theater. I’m like, ‘I don’t understand what this is about, it’s above my pay grade.’ In the theater, everybody has to fucking put their phones down and they have to breathe and they have to sit still. It’s like going back to the farm. There’s a Luddite aspect to it for me.”
But Hawke is a hard guy to keep down. “I went to see the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and I thought, this is actually really cool,” he says. “It’s all these young people dying to be at a live event. The future is here, strangely.”
Later on, I note Broadway’s worrying trends of commercialization — Carrie Coon recently said, “Now in order to do a play on Broadway, you have to do The White Lotus, or else…they have to replace you with someone more famous” — but there, too, Hawke sees the silver lining. “I remember seeing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen do Gadot in London. I would say 90 percent of the audience was under 30, and they were there to see Gandalf and Captain Picard, but the production was brilliant,” he says. “They walked out thrilled, having absorbed Beckett and been given a world-class production. They went for the wrong reason, but it doesn’t matter.”
Might that apply to Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon? In the awards context, at least, this tiny single-location film, featuring more dialogue than your average one-act play, is in the hunt opposite the likes of One Battle After Another, Sinners and Marty Supreme — dwarfed in both production budget and box-office haul. “It kind of falls on me, so it’s been a little lonely,” Hawke admits of the campaign. But those Black Phone 2 posters awaiting his signature after, say, a small tastemaker screening come with territory that Hawke has become intimately familiar with. He’s an artist who’s pushing himself, grateful for anyone coming along for the ride — and from whatever angle.
“I’m not financially supported by Netflix or anyone, they’re not paying for my car ride to go over to these things,” Hawke says. “I’m going as an ambassador for independent film. You’ve got to try to not make it about yourself. Otherwise, it just gets too weird.”
