“I crushed this audition”: Ethan Hawke’s greatest-ever screen test was for a role he didn’t get
For the last four decades, Ethan Hawke has been one of Hollywood’s most dependable figures, one who’s appeared in his fair share of bad movies, but can never be accused of phoning it in.
He’s also something of a renaissance man, having spent his career continually broadening his creative horizons to the point where there isn’t much that he hasn’t done, and he still gives off the impression that there are yet more strings to be added to his bow.
Hawke is a three-time Academy Award-nominated actor and a two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter who won a Daytime Emmy for lending his voice to a six-minute animated short film about a rabbit who thwarts an alien invasion, and that’s barely scratching the surface of his interests on both sides of the camera, not to mention away from it.
He’s also written several novels, directed several features and a couple of documentaries, created and starred in the miniseries, The Good Lord Bird, played Macbeth on Broadway, and turned down the chance to be Joel Schumacher’s Batman, only to voice the character as an anthropomorphised car in a kids’ TV series.
Eclecticism is the operative word, and beyond rejecting the Independence Day role that helped cement Will Smith as a superstar, he doesn’t have too many regrets. There is another major one, admittedly, with Hawke revealing the finest screen test of his entire career resulted in the square root of fuck all.
While starring alongside Ewan McGregor in 2022’s Raymond & Ray, Hawke couldn’t help himself from reminding his co-star that he’d unsuccessfully auditioned for Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! “Ewan doesn’t like this because he gets embarrassed,” he noted, before declaring that he’d given the best screen test of his life in the hopes of being cast as Christian in the musical extravaganza.
“I did not get the part,” he helpfully explained. “I crushed this audition. And it just goes to show you how much I like Ewan’s work: I still went to see the movie on opening day and loved it. So, I got over it.” Not that he was the only famous face who tried and failed to secure the male lead in Luhrmann’s classic.
Leonardo DiCaprio was also in the mix, but confessed that his complete and utter inability to carry a tune meant it was a foregone conclusion that he wouldn’t be reuniting with his Romeo + Juliet director, with Heath Ledger another to deliver an impressive audition in front of the director, who considered him too young for the part.
It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine Hawke in the role, but no matter how good he believed his screen test to be, McGregor’s was obviously better.
