The movie that “meant the world” to Ethan Hawke: “One of the high points of my life”
Ethan Hawke’s career has followed an enviable trajectory, and despite early signs that he was on the path to becoming the next heartthrob and leading man, he chose his roles wisely and has found a balance between low-budget indie movies and blockbusters.
One minute, he’s making life difficult for Greta Gerwig in the low-key Rebecca Miller drama Maggie’s Plan, the next, he’s playing some guy in a cowboy hat named Jolly the Pimp in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, making Hollywood truly his oyster.
Despite his unconventional filmography, Hawke got his start like most movie actors, which is by falling in love with cinema as a kid, and there was one movie in particular that hit him over the head and reorganised his brain, while showcasing some of Hollywood’s hottest young up-and-coming talents.
Hawke’s life was changed as a 13-year-old when he saw Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders for the first time, a melodramatic adaptation based on the SE Hinton’s eponymous novel, following the rivalry between two teenage gangs in Oklahoma in the 1960s, and as anyone who has survived that period can attest, no one is more susceptible to emotional hyperbole, cinematic or otherwise, than impressionable teens.
The actor was just as captivated as the next 13-year-old, and in an interview with Letterboxd alongside his daughter, Maya Hawke, he described watching the film for the first time as “one of the high points of my life” and said that it “meant the world” to him.
Even now, four decades later, it’s easy to see how this overwrought drama about teen angst might make an impression. Coppola deserves credit for his directing, of course, but The Outsiders also benefits from some pretty mind-boggling casting, starring Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillon, and Ralph Macchio, all before they were famous. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle, and no matter how clunky the script is at times, the actors are so electrifying that it’s hard not to be caught up in the spirit of it all.
When the director’s cut was released, Hawke took his daughter to see it, who was about the same age as he had been when the original version was released, but had a very different takeaway.
When they left the cinema, her only comment was, “Now I understand the way you dress”, which might have been a devastating moment for the elder Hawke, but things came together in the end, wherein, speaking about it a decade later, Maya Hawke conceded, “Since then, it’s become the way I dress”.
Whether or not The Outsiders made Hawke want to become an actor, it was clearly a formative moment in his life that lingers to this day. In a 2024 Q&A with AnOther Magazine, he was asked to name the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and after ticking off the usual suspects (the birth of his children, the Grand Canyon, etc), he listed Diane Lane’s character in The Outsiders, which, coming from someone who was once married to Uma Thurman, that’s really saying a lot.
