Ethan Hawke has all the time been an actor filled with surprises. In the midst of his prolific profession, he’s veered from status drama to quirky comedy to full-on horror, embracing every position with the identical dedication. And this yr has introduced a very unlikely convergence of tasks. In Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” he uncannily embodies real-life songwriter Lorenz Hart, a person of many contradictions. On the FX collection “The Lowdown,” created by Hawke’s pal Sterlin Harjo, he’s Lee Raybon, a reckless journalist. And in “Black Telephone 2,” he’s a serial killer haunting youngsters from past the grave.
“It makes you consider in astrology or one thing,” Hawke says, talking over Zoom from New York Metropolis. “All these disparate components of my life are being launched on the identical time. I’ve been so anxious about this entire ageing course of. However the wonderful thing about it’s that the roles get much more sophisticated. They get fewer, however the ones you get are sophisticated and fascinating. I really feel astonished to have been doing this job for 30 years and have two of the perfect components I’ve ever had this yr.”
It’s much more astonishing once you understand Hawke has been planning to play Hart for over a decade. Whereas Hawke and Linklater have been making their 2014 movie “Boyhood,” the filmmaker despatched Hawke an editorial by Robert Kaplow concerning the opening evening of the Broadway musical “Oklahoma!” It wasn’t a script, precisely. Extra like a brief story, recounting the night from Hart’s standpoint as he reconciles with the truth that his former artistic accomplice Richard Rodgers has created a success with Oscar Hammerstein.
“It struck me as one of the vital good concepts I’d ever heard, of what it will be prefer to be Lorenz Hart at that opening evening get together,” Hawke remembers. “It’s all of humanity inside this little night.”
Hawke as legendary songwriter Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon.”
(Sabrina Lantos / Sony Photos Classics)
Over the following few years, Linklater, Hawke and Kaplow labored collectively to construct what turned “Blue Moon,” an intimate, evocative movie that takes place simply months earlier than Hart’s dying. They held quite a few readings, and ultimately Linklater stated, “Let’s make this film.” After taking pictures the pilot episode of “The Lowdown” in Omaha, Hawke shaved his head and flew to Dublin. He felt an unshakable want to play Hart, who reminded him of lots of the males he’d met in theater when he first began appearing.
“There was one thing so human about him,” Hawke says. “On this evening the place he’s being damaged up with by crucial particular person in his life, he by some means decides that he’s in love with a younger lady who doesn’t like him again. It’s such a peculiar human twist. The ache of shedding Richard Rodgers is nearly too nice to be checked out. He’s bought to give you a brand new ache that he could make sense of.”
A lot has already been made from Hawke’s efficiency, which required a bodily transformation alongside the actor’s emotional excavation. Hart was notoriously brief, a minimum of a foot beneath Hawke’s personal top. Linklater achieved the phantasm utilizing solely sensible results. “We knew it was going to be old-school stage craft,” Hawke says. “So typically it was the set, typically it was angles and typically it was elevating different folks up. We requested ourselves, ‘What would Charlie Chaplin do?’”
Hawke felt like he was pulling collectively all the things he’s realized as an actor in three a long time. He describes the position as “utilizing all the things” and compares it to coaching for years to nail an “elaborate ski soar.”
Ethan Hawke. (Victoria Will / For The Occasions)
“It was an incredible second in my life,” he says. “I had actually needed to play this half and I don’t suppose there’s one other director on the earth that may have forged me as Hart. [Linklater] did as a result of he is aware of me so effectively, however I additionally didn’t wish to let him down. Once I first noticed the completed lower of the movie, it was an enormous aid.”
Taking part in Lee in “The Lowdown” was much less of an overt problem. Hawke says he doesn’t know if he’s ever completed a personality additional away from himself than Hart. That was not the case with Lee, a job Harjo wrote particularly for the actor. “Lee’s proper up my alley,” Hawke says. “In an alternate universe, I really feel like that’s me.”
After ending “Blue Moon,” Hawke filmed “Black Telephone 2” whereas his hair grew again out. He then returned to Omaha to shoot the remainder of “The Lowdown,” an expertise he calls “plenty of work however actually enjoyable.” He beloved the broad canvas of tv and the period of time he needed to uncover Lee, a man who’s looking for the easiest way to be a very good man in a corrupt world.
-
Share through
“I beloved taking part in a personality who didn’t wish to get in a combat and who may act damage,” Hawke says. “Usually you’re requested to play these robust guys and it doesn’t actually hassle them after they get punched within the face. Lee may cry. That appeared extra plausible to me.”
Hawke claims to have an “allergy to sequels,” however it was a simple sure from him when Scott Derrickson known as with an concept about easy methods to follow-up his profitable 2021 movie “The Black Telephone.” It’s an instance of how a lot Hawke likes to maintain each himself and his viewers guessing. (In truth, he says he would do third movie if Derrickson had a very good idea.) The actor remembers folks in Hollywood discovering his want to do extremely diversified roles “irritating” when he was youthful.
“Typically, individuals are extra comfy after they know precisely what you’re and what your factor is, and when you preserve altering your factor it’s complicated,” he says. “Nevertheless it’s all the time been fascinating to me to do various things. It makes appearing actually thrilling to me to maintain shaking it up. Every factor has its personal geometry and math, and that retains you actually engaged.”
Hawke with Ryan Kiera Armstrong in “The Lowdown.”
(Shane Brown / FX)
There have been moments in his profession when Hawke has grow to be uninterested in appearing. However when that occurs, he pivots. He’s made documentaries, directed and written novels. He first met Harjo after they collaborated on an adaptation of a graphic novel Hawke had written, “Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars.” However he all the time comes again to performing.
“Every little thing for me is a method of sustaining a newbie’s thoughts,” he says. “I’m all the time placing myself in conditions the place I’m not an professional. However the middle of the wheel for me has all the time been appearing. Every little thing is serving that. I’ve all the time felt when you actually wish to be a very good actor, you must perceive all of the ancillary components.”
Spending time with males like Hart and Lee, as completely different as they’re, reminded Hawke of an inevitable fact. That as people, we’re extra alike than we’re dissimilar.
“The good pleasure and curiosity in efficiency is the continued realization that we’re not as distinctive as we expect we’re,” Hawke says. “And that our capability for empathy and understanding is de facto highly effective. We are able to broaden our sense of self much more than we expect we will. You see all these completely different sorts of individuals, unhealthy guys and good guys, and this factor that we maintain as identification is wildly extra versatile than first imagined. Each time I play a component that asks plenty of me, I stroll away feeling that if there was an empathy meter inside me it has expanded its energy.”
(Victoria Will / For The Occasions)
