The Best of Ethan Hawke
There are moments in an actor's career when everything seems to click. They suddenly hit this stretch where the performances are great, the choices are interesting, the collaborations are exciting, and you start seeing their name in the credits and thinking, "Okay, I'm in."
Ethan Hawke is absolutely having one of those moments right now. Actually, he's been having one for quite a while.
The latest example is The Weight, the outstanding new movie that's in theaters right now and one of the best films I've seen this year. Hawke is terrific in it, and watching him made me realize just how remarkable his run has been over the past decade or so.
He's acting, writing, directing, producing, creating television, making documentaries, working with great filmmakers, popping up in horror movies and Westerns and strange little independent films, and somehow he just keeps getting better. He's become one of those actors whose name in the credits now automatically makes me more interested in whatever I'm about to watch.
And here's the funny thing: I did NOT always feel that way about Ethan Hawke.
There was actually a stretch in the late '80s and especially the '90s when I found him kind of annoying. Some of that probably wasn't his fault because I didn't particularly like some of the movies he was appearing in, but still, he became associated in my mind with a certain kind of overly sensitive, self-conscious '90s young-guy performance that could drive me nuts.
And nowhere was that more evident than Reality Bites.
Jesus Christ, I hated Reality Bites. I still hate Reality Bites. It's one of those quintessentially awful '90s movies that was desperately trying to explain Generation X to itself, and Hawke's brooding musician Troy Dyer became one of the defining Gen-X characters of the decade. A lot of people connected with that character. I wanted him to go away.
That's especially funny considering Hawke had actually been around for almost a decade before Reality Bites. He started as a child actor, making his movie debut at 14 in Joe Dante's Explorers in 1985 opposite River Phoenix.
I love Joe Dante, and Hawke is really charming in that movie. He was just a kid, but you could already see that natural quality he has on camera. He doesn't appear to be "performing" in the traditional sense; there's something conversational and lived-in about him, which would eventually become one of the defining qualities of his work.
His big breakthrough came four years later in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society, another movie where I am definitely in the minority because I actively dislike it. I find it maudlin, pretentious, boring and annoying, although Hawke is perfectly fine in it.
Then came Dad, where he played Ted Danson's son and Jack Lemmon's grandson, and I don't like that movie either. He was much better in White Fang, the Jack London adaptation, where he got to be physical, work with animals and carry an adventure movie.
He continued through movies like A Midnight Clear, Alive, Waterland, Mystery Date and others, and by the time Reality Bites arrived in 1994, Hawke had become something of a Gen-X poster boy whether he particularly wanted that label or not.
Then Richard Linklater came along.
I think the relationship between Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater is one of the great actor-director collaborations in modern American movies.
Their first film together was Before Sunrise in 1995, and that changed everything for me. Hawke and Julie Delpy play Jesse and Céline, two strangers who meet on a train, get off together in Vienna and spend the night walking around and talking.
That's basically the movie. No explosions. No murders. No dinosaurs. No superhero crap. Two intelligent, complicated, sometimes irritating, sometimes funny, sometimes pretentious, completely recognizable young people talking about love, sex, mortality, relationships and life. And it's wonderful.
What Linklater discovered in Hawke (and what Hawke discovered about himself working with Linklater) was that his natural conversational quality could become the entire performance. Hawke and Delpy weren't simply actors delivering dialogue; they became creative partners with Linklater, contributing to the development of Jesse and Céline and eventually sharing screenplay credit on the sequels.
Nine years later came Before Sunset, and nine years after that came Before Midnight. We literally watched these people age, change, fall in love, become disappointed, have children, argue, compromise and deal with all the bullshit that comes with being an adult.
The Before trilogy is one of the great accomplishments in modern cinema, and Hawke's performance across those three movies is essentially one enormous performance stretched across 18 years.
That collaboration with Linklater has continued for more than three decades and has produced some of Hawke's finest work. There was The Newton Boys, the wonderful little chamber piece Tape, his brief appearance with Delpy in Waking Life, and, of course, Boyhood, Linklater's extraordinary experiment in which he filmed the same actors over a period of 12 years.
Hawke plays the father, and one of the beautiful things about the performance is that the character changes without the movie ever stopping to announce, "LOOK! HE'S CHANGING!"
He's immature, charming and somewhat irresponsible when we first meet him, and gradually he becomes a different kind of father and a different kind of man. Hawke received an Oscar nomination for it, and deservedly so.
Then last year Linklater and Hawke reunited yet again for Blue Moon, with Hawke playing the great lyricist Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma!. It's an incredible performance and earned Hawke another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor.
It's also the kind of performance that makes you appreciate just how far he has traveled from the tousled-haired Gen-X heartthrob of Reality Bites. He's funny, bitter, brilliant, insecure, self-destructive, heartbreaking and physically transformed. Linklater had apparently been sitting on the project for years because Hawke needed to become old enough to play Hart.
That's an amazing thing when you think about it: a filmmaker and an actor collaborating for so long that they can literally wait for the actor to age into a role.
But Hawke's career is much bigger than Richard Linklater, and that's where things get really interesting. He has made science fiction, horror, crime movies, Westerns, historical dramas, romantic movies, Shakespeare, big studio pictures and tiny independent films.
He's terrific in Gattaca, Andrew Niccol's great 1997 science-fiction film, playing a genetically "inferior" man trying to infiltrate a world obsessed with genetic perfection. He even tackled Hamlet in 2000 in Michael Almereyda's very modern, very strange adaptation. I have some problems with that movie, but I admire Hawke's willingness to try it.
Then came Training Day in 2001, and I think that was another major turning point. Denzel Washington gives what I consider his greatest performance in that movie. It's enormous, frightening, charismatic, funny and completely commanding.
Denzel won the Oscar, and absolutely deserved it. But Ethan Hawke has the much less flashy job of playing Jake Hoyt, the rookie cop who spends the day slowly realizing that the man supposedly training him is a corrupt monster. Hawke has to stand next to one of the greatest actors alive while Denzel is devouring the scenery, and he never disappears. He goes toe-to-toe with him.
That performance earned Hawke his first acting Oscar nomination and proved beyond any doubt that this guy could really, really act.
He was also terrific opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in Sidney Lumet's final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, one of those relentlessly dark crime movies where everybody makes one terrible decision after another until their entire lives collapse.
Hawke plays the weaker, more frightened brother, and it's a great example of something he does beautifully: playing men who are scared, insecure, compromised or failing without trying to make them conventionally heroic.
And somewhere along the way Ethan Hawke also became a terrific genre actor, which I love. He made Daybreakers, Sinister, The Purge, Taking Lives, the Black Phone movies and other thrillers and horror films. He doesn't approach genre movies like they're somehow beneath him. He commits to them. That's important.
There are actors who wander into horror movies looking like they're waiting for somebody to hand them their paycheck so they can leave. Hawke understands that horror can give an actor fascinating material if you actually respect it.
He's equally convincing in Westerns. He was in the remake of The Magnificent Seven, Ti West's In a Valley of Violence, and one of my favorite things he's ever done is Pedro Almodóvar's short film Strange Way of Life, opposite Pedro Pascal. It's a beautiful, strange, sexy, melancholy queer Western, and Hawke is fantastic in it.
He also showed up in Robert Eggers' The Northman, looking completely at home in this insane, violent Viking nightmare. Put Ethan Hawke in a modern crime movie, a vampire movie, a Western, a Viking epic or a tiny room with two people talking and somehow he fits.
And then there's First Reformed.
Paul Schrader's First Reformed is one of the great American films of the past decade, and Hawke gives one of the best performances of his career as Reverend Ernst Toller, a former military chaplain working at a tiny historic church in upstate New York.
He's grieving the death of his son, carrying enormous guilt, physically deteriorating and slowly becoming consumed by questions of faith, environmental destruction, despair and whether humanity deserves salvation at all. It's an incredibly interior performance.
Hawke doesn't need big speeches or actorly fireworks. You watch this man's soul collapsing behind his eyes. It's remarkable, and the fact that he wasn't nominated for an Oscar for First Reformed remains ridiculous.
His television work has become just as interesting. He was absolutely fantastic as abolitionist John Brown in The Good Lord Bird, a huge, wild, funny, frightening performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
He played the villain Arthur Harrow in Marvel's Moon Knight, and he's currently terrific in FX's The Lowdown. Television has become another place where Hawke can stretch out, take chances and build strange, complicated characters, and he seems completely at home there.
The other important thing about Ethan Hawke is that calling him simply an actor doesn't really describe what he does. He's been writing almost as long as he's been acting. He's published novels. He's written screenplays. He's directed theater and movies.
His feature directing credits include Chelsea Walls, The Hottest State, Blaze and Wildcat, the latter starring his daughter Maya Hawke. He's made documentaries, including Seymour: An Introduction, the terrific The Last Movie Stars about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and Highway 99: A Double Album about Merle Haggard.
He co-founded a theater company when he was barely into his twenties, made his Broadway debut in Chekhov's The Seagull, and later received a Tony nomination for The Coast of Utopia. This isn't somebody who became famous and then decided he wanted to call himself an artist. He's been interested in the entire process of storytelling almost from the beginning.
And that, I think, is a huge part of why he's gotten so much better with age. Hawke seems genuinely curious. He wants to understand acting, writing, directing, theater, music, literature and filmmaking. He wants to work with interesting people.
He has cited actors like Denzel Washington and Robert De Niro as influences, and filmmakers like Peter Weir and Linklater as people who helped shape his understanding of what movies could be. Instead of spending his career trying to protect some carefully manufactured movie-star image, he has allowed himself to get older, stranger, more weathered and more interesting.
That's the Ethan Hawke I love watching now.
It's also why his current run is so exciting. Between First Reformed, The Northman, Strange Way of Life, The Black Phone films, The Good Lord Bird, The Lowdown, Blue Moon and now The Weight, we're watching an actor who seems to understand exactly where he is in his life and career and is using it.
He doesn't have to be the handsome young leading man anymore. He can be damaged. He can be pathetic. He can be frightening. He can be funny. He can disappear into a historical character or walk into a genre movie and immediately give it credibility. And he can still sit across from another actor and simply talk, which may be the thing he's always done best.
So, yeah, it took me a while. The guy from Reality Bites had some work to do with me.
But he did it.
With The Weight in theaters right now and Ethan Hawke continuing this extraordinary stretch of work, this seemed like the perfect time to go back through a career that now spans more than 40 years and pick the performances that have stayed with me the most.
There are great performances that didn't make it, which tells you something about how deep the career has become, and I've included the entire Before trilogy as one performance because Jesse is one character whose life we watch unfold across three films.
These aren't ranked. They're simply the ten Ethan Hawke performances I love the most, from science fiction and crime movies to Westerns, historical dramas, Richard Linklater collaborations and one of the greatest Paul Schrader movies ever made.
MY 10 FAVORITE ETHAN HAWKE PERFORMANCES (in no particular order):
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