The one movie that changed Ethan Hawke’s life: “I was permanently altered”
Sometimes, all it takes is a single movie to change a person’s life forever, an experience that befell Ethan Hawke before he’d even had an inkling that pursuing acting would be his calling.
Initially, he’d wanted to be a writer, but after making his stage debut at the age of 13, he was bitten by the bug. Of course, he’d end up doing both in the long run, but years beforehand, he’d been exposed to a stone-cold classic of American cinema that impacted him not only in the immediate aftermath but in the years to come.
Having developed and directed the entirety of a star-studded documentary miniseries adapted from unreleased memoirs, it should go without saying that Paul Newman was the single biggest inspiration Hawke carried with him throughout his life. He’d been a fan as long as he could remember, so turning that appreciation into a professional endeavour was the next logical step.
Hawke even used Newman as the barometer over whether or not he should accept an invitation to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ultimately deciding that because Newman wasn’t averse to the odd flight of fancy like The Towering Inferno, there was no reason why he shouldn’t join the superhero franchise to play the villain in Moon Knight.
Of course, Newman once referred to his antagonistic outing with Steve McQueen as being a “junk movie,” but if the odd bout of escapism was good enough for the blue-eyed legend, then it was good enough for Hawke. Robert Redford didn’t exert quite the same influence over him, though, even if it was their seminal first collaboration that blew the youngster’s mind like no other film had done before.
“I remember they were having a revival of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Hawke reflected to A.Frame. “I was probably about nine. It was playing in the movie theatre, and my father took me, and I lost all interest in everything else.”
From that moment on, Hawke was obsessed with the four-time Academy Award-winning western and the most decorated feature in the history of the Baftas, admitting “I was permanently altered” by the time the credits rolled following Butch and Sundance’s unforgettable final stand and freeze-frame ending.
More than that, he’d found himself an idol in Newman, who’d go on to shape the performer Hawke wanted to become once he’d made his mind up that acting was going to be his full-time vocation. They may have never worked together, but even then, it might have ruined the mystique somewhat if they had.
He couldn’t have cared less about Redford, looking at how his career panned out, but the other half of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid‘s titular duo has been the most monumental influence on Hawke’s entire existence, and there’s nobody else who even comes close.
