The last time I saw Ethan Hawke was at the Odeon, in 2018. I remember him talking about Bright Lights Big City and joking about doing coke in the bathroom. Then he recognized the maître d’ as an old high school friend of his daughter.
We talked in that conversation, as we do in this one, about what it was like to be a generational icon in the ’90s, and what it’s like to be that same icon now, at 55. I know I am not alone when I say my sensibility was probably shaped by the characters he played and the attitude he embodied in films like Reality Bites and Before Sunset. Hawke isn’t actually those guys. But he still carries within him a rebel spirit, a distaste for fakeness and insincerity that I admire and relate to.
Those attitudes are on display, in different ways, in his two most recent projects: The Weight, an old-school adventure film with Russell Crowe that came out last month, and the second season of The Lowdown, the very fun Sterlin Harjo-created series about a bookstore owner who keeps getting mixed up in various crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last year, he was nominated for his fifth Oscar for his performance in Blue Moon, the beautifully rendered Richard Linklater film about the melancholy final days of Lorenz Hart, of the once-great duo Rogers and Hart.
Hawke has been doing this a long time now, but he still clearly relishes the work. “I was in Dead Poets Society and Robin Williams looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may,’” he says. “And I took that shit seriously.”
The following conversation is lightly edited and condensed from the latest episode of One More Question with Zach Baron. Watch below or on YouTube. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The first time we met was in 2018, and in the time since I last saw you, you’ve shot approximately 20 films, five or six seasons of television, and written a novel. What accounts for that pace?
I’ll probably say something really corny—there’s a line, it could be credited to Thoreau, but a line about if you do what you love, you don’t work a day in your life. And I’ve had an interesting ride in this life where I’ve really gotten to do things that I really want to do, and that gives me a lot of energy. And that’s the positive way of saying it. And the negative way of saying it would be that I’m a little restless and uncomfortable and doing things makes me feel better.
When you say “uncomfortable,” what do you mean?
Life is kind of scratchy. So, feeling dissatisfied or ill at ease—that’s the negative way of portraying it. And both are true. I really took that whole follow your bliss thing [to heart]. I was in Dead Poets Society and Robin Williams looked me in the eyes and said, “Gather ye rosebuds while you may.” And I took that shit seriously. And I think I only realized later what a profound impact that movie had on me. To have your first experience in the arts be that movie, which is this mantra of carpe diem and everything that that film is about, was something I really took to heart. That’s the positive spin on it. And the negative thing is I’m just always uncomfortable. So they’re both true.
There are actors who fear if they slow down, things will just stop.
That’s not driving me. I’m going to butcher it, but I read this obituary of Paul Scofield, who’s a great English actor—A Man for All Seasons was the thing that I saw him in when I was young, but he was a really amazing actor. And I actually met him a couple times at benefit performances and things like that. And he died and they asked him at the end of his life why he had been performing at his local church. He’d stopped performing in the West End or Broadway. Somebody had interviewed him saying, “Well, if you can still perform, why aren’t you performing for bigger audiences?” And he said, “Well, I really like walking to work and I’ve always only performed for my maker anyway, so I really don’t care who’s in the audience.” And I feel that way—that all the work is in service of some dialogue that I’m having with whatever that other force is. It’s like giving birth to the universe. And the ’all slowing down and stopping’ thing—when you say it like that, that kind of thrills me.
In what way?
I don’t know. I’d love to be on the moon. The accumulation of status and power and money and those things that seem to propel culture, I’ve always been incredibly suspicious of. And so when you say ‘slow down and stop,’ I say, “Ooh, would that all go away?” That would be really wonderful because then I could just make things.
What makes you say yes to something at this point?
I was thinking about it before this interview started, and to a large extent, I haven’t really said yes to anything. So many of the things I’ve been doing the last 10 years have been self-motivated. It’s more me asking somebody else to say yes. You take The Good Lord Bird or Blue Moon or The Weight or The Lowdown. These are all projects that were born out of friendship and out of some kind of shared love—that scary word.
Is “love” a scary word?
I think it comes off poorly. It’s so overused, but it’s such a powerful, real thing. And when you really have love for material. [Richard] Linklater and I just absolutely loved this piece of writing that was Blue Moon, and we just had a passion for it. We, for years, would just talk about it. And so I didn’t say yes to that project. It was a really good friend of mine sent me this really interesting piece of writing and we geeked out over it for years and then we started asking people for money to make it. And The Lowdown happened with Sterlin Harjo and our friendship, it happened really organically and naturally. And so the idea that I’m sitting there at my desk reading scripts going, “No, no, yes, yes, no, no”—it doesn’t really happen like that.
You told me something interesting when we last spoke. You said something to the effect of: “The roles I’m proudest of, and the movies I love the most, are not the ones that paid me.”
There’s a direct correlation I find that the more you love a project, the less you get paid. If you want to beat the algorithm, it’s very difficult to do that and be paid. The victory of Blue Moon is that that movie exists at all. The algorithm is not asking for that movie. The world is not demanding that piece of entertainment. We are humbly begging you to watch it. And usually if you’re being paid a lot of money, it’s because the algorithm wants it. They want it. They’re paying you for something. I mean, if you get to act in a Shakespeare play or something, you sit there and memorize your lines and it’s like a gift. But you get paid $234 a week to do that. And that’s okay.
You were nominated for an Oscar for Blue Moon. It sounds ridiculous when I say this out loud, but did that mean anything to you?
I mean, I love acting and our culture takes that prize really seriously. I don’t like those kinds of barometers put on art. I resist it on some instinctual level, but I definitely prefer to be nominated and then complain about it. That’s definitely the way that I’d like to go.
You now have five total nominations—three for acting, in Training Day, Boyhood, and Blue Moon, and then two for writing on the Before movies. Does that feel high, low, or just the right amount to you?
When I was younger, what I really, really coveted was—Juliette Binoche has won best actor at Cannes, Berlin, and Venice. That’s badass. Those are jury prizes. There’s no campaigning for that. You know what I mean? The movie doesn’t have to be a hit. You don’t need to have a good publicity angle. There’s so much big business attached to the Oscars that’s slightly different. Whereas those jury prizes are really worth coveting and I don’t have a single one. So by that ratio, I’m just a loser. I think it’s just envy that’s kept me from the prize. That’s a joke. I try not to indulge those aspects of—we’re all hungry for more attention and more praise, and to fan those flames inside yourself is dangerous. You got to take it as a compliment. It feels great. When I hear you say I’ve been nominated five times, I think that sounds really cool. There’s still a 13-year-old inside here, right? And the 13-year-old goes, “That true? That’s awesome, man. Great job.” So I feel particularly lucky, because with all the films that you mentioned are things that are really important to me. I love those projects.
Training Day was the first nomination you received. I asked you the last time we sat down, “Did that feel like the beginning of something or the end of something?” And you said something very interesting. You said, “It could have been the beginning of something, but then I got divorced and my personal life fell apart.”
[Laughs.] I told you the truth!
Is that uncommon, to tell the truth?
Yeah, in public. It’s scary. to tell the truth. The world’s cold and mean, and people are critical, and people aren’t your best friend. They see things through a lens that sometimes maybe it’s accurate, but it can be uncomfortable. But yeah, that was the truth. That was a professional high-water mark that then quickly turned into a personal disaster zone.
In preparing for this, I read your most recent novel, 2021’s A Bright Ray of Darkness, which seems to be very much about this period. For those that don’t know the plot of this book, it’s about an actor who is going through marital troubles, castigating himself for infidelity and drug use while starring in the play Henry IV on Broadway, which you actually did—the last part, anyway.
I don’t know how other people write, but I am an actor and I like to direct and I like to write, and I’ve learned about them through the centerpiece of my life being acting. You hear this phrase autofiction—it’s like I have a shadow self. And for example, the Before trilogy, Jesse, there’s certain things that happened to me that I feel like, “Ooh, that could happen to Jesse and that could be…” And it starts to take on a story and a narrative. Jesse’s not me, but there’s an aspect of me that is like Jesse. And likewise, with William Harding in A Bright Ray of Darkness, it’s like a shadow self. There’s aspects pulled from other people. There’s aspects pulled from my real life. I kind of bought that whole write what you know thing they tell you in school. Don DeLillo would have to do 30 years of research to know what I know about the life of an actor. So if I wanted to contribute, I should probably use that experience.
And what I really wanted to write about was the healing transformative power of art. And so I had to create a character that was going through a depression, to use what I know about depression and let him be transformed by an experience. I’m pulling all 25, 30 years of experience in the theater to create this fictional show. I had to pick a play I’d done before because I wanted to pick one I knew intimately and had something to say about. It seemed to fit the themes that I was writing about. I don’t even feel in control of that part of my brain. It’s not like you wake up in the morning and think, “I want to write this.” I just find myself doing it and it feels healthy and it feels rewarding to me and I just kind of follow that voice. Does that make sense?
There’s this very interesting thing in the book where the character is sort of like, “I have this public-facing persona as a nice soulful guy, and I don’t actually think I’m a nice soulful guy.” And in those moments, I’m like, “But the real life Ethan Hawke does seem like a nice soulful guy to me!”
Well, you seem like a nice soulful guy too, but that doesn’t mean that you sometimes don’t turn the microscope inward and see aspects of you that are not public facing and ones that you don’t like. And I don’t see anything wrong with scouring them and looking at them. And none of us are one thing all the time. And the public facing thing is asking us to be one thing or be something identifiable or people can be loving and kind and responsible and humble and they can have a temper tantrum and where does that temper tantrum come from? Where is that seed? I love fiction because of its power to go deep inside. Literature is a great place for the spiritual life, all the things that somehow get smaller when you photograph them.
To your point about public facing versions of yourself, I think you also write at some point in that book, “Fame is a Black Death.”
Well, I wouldn’t be the first person to say that there’s an aspect of celebrity that is like a disease. And you can handle little bits of it, but too much of it—we can see what happened to Elvis and we can see Michael Jackson. It’s a form of isolation. It’s like being put in a zoo, and zoo animals go nuts. So do human beings. And it seems like a kind of nice isolation because people are giving you money and they’re telling you you’re wonderful, but nobody’s being real with you. And that makes people insane. And they start scratching, trying to find some real life. And sometimes people do that with drugs, some people do that with acting out or getting in fights or whatever the ways that people do it. But to not take fame seriously as a corrosive problem is to miss it. That’s not all it is. You can do a lot of great things with it. I like to make great movies with it, or at least try to. But in that moment in the book he’s talking to an older actor who he really respects, and one of the gists is you have to ask yourself what God you’re chasing. And what the king in that book is saying is that if you want to live a meaningful substantive life in the arts, there is a path. If you want to chase the Black Death, that’s a path too.
I was thinking about this the other day, but I want to phrase it as a question. Do you think there is now a generation of moviegoer or television watcher that doesn’t know you as a kind of generational icon?
Oh, tons. It’s amazing. On one level, I’ve done a lot of things, but I mean, I swear it’s fascinating. I was at the airport the other day and a guy said to me, “Hey, wow—you still acting?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Good for you. Keep fighting.” I was like, “Well, he doesn’t think I did anything since Dead Poets Society or something like that.” And there are people that know me from Training Day and don’t think I’ve acted in anything else. And there’s people that think the only thing that I ever did that mattered was Before Sunrise. And there’s people that only watch horror films and they think: “That poor guy hasn’t had a job since Sinister.”
And one of the things I really like about my career is that I’ve played in a lot of different genres and a lot of different types of movies. A lot of people don’t know I wrote a book. A lot of people have never heard of Blue Moon. And probably the first time they ever heard of it was Oscar night and then they thought, “What the hell’s that? Looks terrible.” I feel really lucky that I have a certain level of fame that is very pleasing to me, if I’m allowed to say that, which is that I’m getting to work with really talented people and I really can go to the grocery store. And there’s a certain level of fame above me where life gets really uncomfortable and I’m really glad that I never pushed beyond that.
I’m 44. I’m part of a generation of people who were teenagers in the ’90s and did a lot of identity formation then. And at the time, these movies like Reality Bites or Before Sunrise basically come out back to back. You were a spokesman for a generation and for a while, whether you wanted to or not, that was a flag that you were waving or something that people associated you with. And I wondered if lately it’s like: “Oh, maybe I can put down that flag?”
As my generation has matured, those kinds of labels get less interesting. Those kinds of labels are really interesting to young people, like putting yourself in a box: I’m this type of person, I’m a punk rocker, I’m a Deadhead, I’m a jock, I’m a science nerd. We are all trying to put ourselves in a label and Gen X was a thing in Reality Bites, and Linklater had just made Slacker and then we made Before Sunrise together. I look back on it now with a real sense of humor. I kind of enjoy it. At the time, I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to carry a flag for anybody. I don’t even understand what that means.” And now it matters less, and so I guess I can laugh about it. It’s fascinating—how Kerouac was destroyed by the Beat Generation thing and Allen Ginsberg outlived it. At the end of his life, he was just a great poet and he had changed with the times as a poet and he wasn’t boxed in by the Beat Generation thing as whereas I feel like Kerouac took it really seriously and that combined with a ton of alcohol eroded the foundations of the poet in him. Dylan has survived so many different chapters. The really great artists can grow and change with their times.
And you’re saying that’s the category you hope to find yourself in?
I’m a student. I’m a pupil in that church. I’m a monk of that order, if you will. That’s what I’m trying to do: Live a substantive, meaningful life in the arts. That’s my goal.
I both like what you’re saying and I also think I mourn the world depicted in those films, if you know what I’m saying.
But don’t you mourn everything? I mean, it’s just like: Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. The clock is always ticking and everything. Something’s coming, something’s going. Arrivals and departures, always happening. I mean, the way you might feel about those movies is kind of the way that I felt about The Outsiders. That movie came out when I was the perfect age. I was 13, 14. I was the age of the younger kids in it. I had just read the book and then the movie came out and that was an ethos and a style, a swagger that I wanted to live inside that movie. I wanted to be that movie. And that’s gone. Gone. All that’s gone. And the ’90s are gone, but I do feel like what’s cool about them, we carry with us.
Yeah. Although I would very much like to be in Europe without a cell phone and any money right now.
We didn’t even know how good we had it. My oldest daughter showed Before Sunrise to some friends and she asked them what they thought of it and they said: “I love that movie, but it was just so unrealistic. They didn’t have a phone? Why wouldn’t they share their number?” We didn’t have cell phones! They thought we were making an artistic choice to have Jesse and Celine not have a phone.
You told me a story about this time about watching the Oscars with some friends and I think it was Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty presenting an award and a friend of yours was like, “Get off the stage, old man.” And it occurred to me—
That I’m probably as old as those guys were? It happened so fast.
Do you feel differently about that story now, being at the same age as them?
No, I still like that story. I think that that’s the way young people are supposed to think. Like, Give me my turn! You’ve had the mic too long. And what I like about it is if you don’t have anything to say, you should let go of the mic. And we’re starting to see younger voices really take form. I remember walking out of Slacker or walking out of Pulp Fiction and feeling like, “Wow, that’s my generation. My generation’s talking in the ether.” And now I’m seeing younger generations talking, making art. It’s like: “Come on, come on, come on, take the mic.”
I believe in rebellion. And I think we’re fundamentally not superficial. And I think people are going to wake up and punch back and there’s going to be massive movements in music and massive movements in live theater and massive movements of people getting together. We’re not done. We’re an ongoing poem. So it’s not like it all stopped today just with some kind of harsh reality. I believe in rebellion and it’s always churning up the soil. So don’t worry that the money and the greedy bastards that think they control everybody, they always lose in the end. And they’re all going in the grave eventually. They think they’re winning, but they’re losing because their lives are worthless.
You are, among other things, about to come out with the second season of a television show, The Lowdown. You guys shoot the show in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I think there are actors of your age and stature who would be like, “I’m not shooting a whole TV show in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
Well, those people don’t deserve to shoot a movie in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Okay? And that’s the truth. That is the attitude of a lost soul. Tulsa is amazing. The center of this country is amazing. The thing about my friend Sterlin is he’s just introduced me to so many people and there’s so many fascinating communities and musicians and artists and politicians who are doing cool things. There’s a spirit to The Lowdown that is connected to my spirit. And Sterlin is a real artist. I saw Reservation Dogs and it was the first really new thing on television I’d seen. And it felt like cinema to me, whatever people mean when they say that word. I think what it means to me is when somebody is expressing themselves, when they’re not reaching their hand in your pocket and taking out a $20 bill. And so if he lives in Tulsa and he wants to make a show in Tulsa and is inviting me to collaborate with him, I don’t want to waste your time. I want to make something worth seeing. And if you worry too much about how many pairs of shoes you have or what you’re going to buy, you’ve lost the plot. We’re all going to be dead in five minutes and I’ve only got a handful of moments to try to make something worth your time.
I was watching the show the other day and thinking: your role could have been a very typecast version of an Ethan Hawke character—bookstore owner, writer, bon vivant—but the actual performance is very different, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Do you know what I’m saying?
I know exactly what you mean. This part is a fast ball across the plate for me, thrown exactly where I want it. It’s easy. But what’s so cool about it from my point of view is it is also a character. So it’s not like I’m playing some version of myself that I’ve done before. It’s not Jesse from the Before trilogy or the dad from Boyhood. There’s aspects of that. And there’s aspects of Sterlin that he’s in a direct line with Altman and Linklater and he’s the same kind of filmmaker. And he grew up watching me and he kind of has things that I do that he likes that he wants me to do on the show. And I know that and he knows that. But we’ve also built Lee Raybon, who’s his own person. And hopefully my thing about acting is I want you to be able to smell it. I want you to smell that bookstore. I want you to smell Lee’s car. I want it to be real and lived in, and that’s a lifetime of studying acting. People don’t like to talk about it as a craft really. I guess it’s more fun to talk about it as pop culture or something. But I remember I felt like when I watched The Godfather, I felt like if I went to the Knicks game, I might see Michael Corleone. That’s how real he seemed to me. Or like Rocky Balboa. I felt like you go to Philly, you might run into Rocky. He might be running down the street working out. And those are my favorite kind of performances. And Sterlin is great at world-building, and so it’s bigger than me. It’s like being on a really good team. You play better. There’s some players that like to run up a scoring title on a losing team. That ain’t me.
Your most recent film is called The Weight. I’ve heard you say that was a difficult shoot. I wonder about your appetite for difficult at this point.
I love difficult. I grew up reading about John Huston and Bogart, African Queen, and the leeches and it all just sounded so badass and fun, and I wanted to make a tough movie like that. We wanted to make a movie kind of like Sorcerer or Wages of Fear or Treasure of Sierra Madre or Cool Hand Luke, these kind of movies where there was a toughness to them and you left feeling like it was possible to be a good man.
For those that don’t know the plot of the film, you play a very capable man who is separated from his daughter and thrown in a prison camp, and then it becomes an adventure film like the ones you’re talking about. I’ve also heard you say that you wanted to play a role like that before you got too old.
I mean, when I did Training Day, I really thought I’d be in a lot of action movies. I just thought that was going to happen for me. When I was younger, I thought I’d be in a lot of comedies. I thought everything would be different somehow. How it is is fine. Interesting, of course. But in five minutes, I’ll be too old to be the hero in an action movie. I probably already am. But I wanted to try to do it and I feel really proud of the movie and I’m glad we did it.
Do you mourn the fact that in five minutes you’ll be too old to play an action hero?
I try not to let myself think like that even though I just said that, because what I try to think about is, “Ooh, Prospero’s coming. Ooh, King Lear’s in the way.” I never took any pride in it until it was gone, but there was a time period where posters in my film were in college dorm rooms across America. Those days are done. So I never was proud of it when it was happening, but now I’m like, “Well, that’s cool. I wish that still was,” but you have to kind of embrace what is.
You wish that they still had the posters.
No, I’m making a joke. I meet those women now at my kids’ soccer games and they say, “I had your picture up in my college dorm,” And I think that we have some bond, secret between us. But that makes me feel good.