Ethan Hawke and the squandered Batman opportunity: “I wish I’d done it”
These days, Ethan Hawke is one of the most acclaimed actors working in Hollywood. Over the years, he has managed to walk the fine line between commercially accessible fare like Training Day, Sinister, and The Purge with smaller, thought-provoking indie movies such as First Reformed, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and Boyhood.
When he first began to pick up steam as one of the most exciting young prospects in the movie business in the mid-1990s, though, he was offered one of the most iconic roles any star could ever hope to be considered for. He turned it down, but later wondered how different his career would have been if he’d said “yes”.
In 1994, Hawke graduated from teenage and young adult roles, like Explorers, Dead Poets Society, and White Fang, by starring in the seminal study of Generation X that was Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites. The following year, he became a sensitive romantic icon for his generation in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and suddenly, offers for big studio films began flooding in. In fact, in 2011, he told Details that, to his eternal surprise, he was offered the most sought-after role in the business: Batman.
You see, in the wake of Batman Returns fizzling slightly at the box office—not to mention leaving legions of kids crying into their Happy Meals because of its dark tone and gruesome imagery—Warner Bros. wanted to course-correct the franchise. Michael Keaton wasn’t interested in altering his vision of the Dark Knight, especially without director Tim Burton, who was politely encouraged to pursue other opportunities instead of beginning work on Batman 3. So, after Keaton turned down a reported $15million to don the cowl again, the studio needed a new body to fill the Batsuit.
Joel Schumacher, director of The Lost Boys and Falling Down, was hired to make an all-new, brighter, and more fun take on the Caped Crusader, and he knew exactly who he wanted to cast in the lead role: Hawke. Unfortunately for the helmer, though, Hawke didn’t see the opportunity to play the world’s most beloved superhero as something that got his engine revving, so he said no.
“I just didn’t want to go to the Knicks game and have everybody go, ‘Wow, you were a great Batman!'” Hawke explained. “That wasn’t my fucking goal in life.”
After being brushed off by Hawke, Schumacher went for his next option: Val Kilmer, whose beautifully weird performance in Tombstone had put him on the radar for all the prominent leading man roles of the era. Kilmer agreed without even reading the script – something he’d later regret – and Hawke made the mostly forgotten Search and Destroy instead.
As his career evolved, though, Hawke had a change of heart about his youthful decision to turn down a trip to Gotham City. “Now, I wish I’d done it,” he admitted to Details, “Because I could have used it to do other things.”
While this quote didn’t exactly scream that the actor was devastated that he missed out on playing Batman because he truly believed in the material, it does speak to the harsh reality of working in Hollywood. Hawke has never made a movie that enjoyed as much box office success as Batman Forever, and it sounds like he started to wonder if he could have used that Bat-cache to get greenlights on riskier, smaller projects he was more passionate about.
Ultimately, though, Hawke was presented with a second opportunity to play Batman in 2022. Admittedly, lending his voice to a kids’ cartoon called Batwheels – in which all the superheroes’ vehicles are brought to life by the Batcomputer – isn’t quite as cool as joining the character’s cinematic legacy, but hey, at least it paid the bills. It probably also softened the blow that his girlfriend and future wife, Uma Thurman, played the villainous Poison Ivy in 1997’s Batman & Robin.
