Ethan Hawke has at all times 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 sequence “The Lowdown,” created by Hawke’s pal Sterlin Harjo, he’s Lee Raybon, a reckless journalist. And in “Black Phone 2,” he’s a serial killer haunting kids from past the grave.
“It makes you believe in astrology or something,” Hawke says, talking over Zoom from New York Metropolis. “All these disparate parts of my life are being released at the same time. I’ve been so worried about this whole aging process. But the great thing about it is that the roles get a lot more complicated. They get fewer, but the ones you get are complicated and interesting. I feel astonished to have been doing this job for 30 years and have two of the best parts I’ve ever had this year.”
It’s much more astonishing while you understand Hawke has been planning to play Hart for over a decade. Whereas Hawke and Linklater had been making their 2014 movie “Boyhood,” the filmmaker despatched Hawke an editorial by Robert Kaplow in regards to the opening night time 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 inventive associate Richard Rodgers has created a success with Oscar Hammerstein.
“It struck me as one of the most brilliant ideas I’d ever heard, of what it would be like to be Lorenz Hart at that opening night party,” Hawke recollects. “It’s all of humanity inside this little evening.”
Hawke as legendary songwriter Lorenz Hart in “Blue Moon.”
(Sabrina Lantos / Sony Photos Classics)
Over the subsequent 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 loss of life. They held quite a few readings, and ultimately Linklater stated, “Let’s make this movie.” After capturing 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 something so human about him,” Hawke says. “On this night where he’s being broken up with by the most important person in his life, he somehow decides that he’s in love with a young woman who doesn’t like him back. It’s such a peculiar human twist. The pain of losing Richard Rodgers is almost too great to be looked at. He’s got to come up with a new pain that he can make sense of.”
A lot has already been product of Hawke’s efficiency, which required a bodily transformation alongside the actor’s emotional excavation. Hart was notoriously quick, at the very least a foot under 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 sometimes it was the set, sometimes it was angles and sometimes it was raising other people up. We asked ourselves, ‘What would Charlie Chaplin do?’”
Hawke felt like he was pulling collectively every part he’s realized as an actor in three a long time. He describes the position as “using everything” and compares it to coaching for years to nail an “elaborate ski jump.”
Ethan Hawke. (Victoria Will / For The Instances)
“It was a great moment in my life,” he says. “I had really wanted to play this part and I don’t think there’s another director in the world that would have cast me as Hart. [Linklater] did because he knows me so well, but I also didn’t want to let him down. When I first saw the finished cut of the film, it was a huge relief.”
Enjoying Lee in “The Lowdown” was much less of an overt problem. Hawke says he doesn’t know if he’s ever carried out 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 right up my alley,” Hawke says. “In an alternate universe, I feel like that is me.”
After ending “Blue Moon,” Hawke filmed “Black Phone 2” whereas his hair grew again out. He then returned to Omaha to shoot the remainder of “The Lowdown,” an expertise he calls “a lot of work but really fun.” He beloved the broad canvas of tv and the period of time he needed to uncover Lee, a man who’s looking for one of the simplest ways to be an excellent man in a corrupt world.
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“I loved playing a character who didn’t want to get in a fight and who could act hurt,” Hawke says. “Often you’re asked to play these tough guys and it doesn’t really bother them when they get punched in the face. Lee could cry. That seemed more believable to me.”
Hawke claims to have an “allergy to sequels,” nevertheless it was a simple sure from him when Scott Derrickson referred to as with an concept about tips on how to follow-up his profitable 2021 movie “The Black Phone.” It’s an instance of how a lot Hawke likes to maintain each himself and his viewers guessing. (Actually, he says he would do third movie if Derrickson had an excellent idea.) The actor recollects folks in Hollywood discovering his want to do extremely diverse roles “irritating” when he was youthful.
“Generally, people are more comfortable when they know exactly what you are and what your thing is, and if you keep changing your thing it’s confusing,” he says. “But it’s always been interesting to me to do different things. It makes acting really exciting to me to keep shaking it up. Each thing has its own geometry and math, and that keeps you really engaged.”
Hawke with Ryan Kiera Armstrong in “The Lowdown.”
(Shane Brown / FX)
There have been moments in his profession when Hawke has turn into bored with appearing. However when that occurs, he pivots. He’s made documentaries, directed and written novels. He first met Harjo once they collaborated on an adaptation of a graphic novel Hawke had written, “Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars.” However he at all times comes again to performing.
“Everything for me is a way of maintaining a beginner’s mind,” he says. “I’m always putting myself in situations where I’m not an expert. But the center of the wheel for me has always been acting. Everything is serving that. I’ve always felt if you really want to be a good actor, you have to understand all the ancillary parts.”
Spending time with males like Hart and Lee, as totally different as they’re, reminded Hawke of an inevitable fact. That as people, we’re extra alike than we’re dissimilar.
“The great joy and interest in performance is the ongoing realization that we are not as unique as we think we are,” Hawke says. “And that our ability for empathy and understanding is really powerful. We can expand our sense of self a lot more than we think we can. You see all these different kinds of people, bad guys and good guys, and this thing that we hold as identity is wildly more flexible than first imagined. Every time I play a part that asks a lot of me, I walk away feeling that if there was an empathy meter inside of me it has expanded its power.”
(Victoria Will / For The Instances)
