The one role Ethan Hawke will always regret turning down: “It wasn’t that good, was it?”
As tends to be the case with any career that dates back almost 40 years, there isn’t much Ethan Hawke hasn’t done. However, playing the lead role in a blockbuster movie is one of the very few notable absentees in his filmography, even if those offers have been made.
The four-time Academy Award nominee hasn’t been completely averse to expensive productions, having saddled up as a member of Denzel Washington’s posse in The Magnificent Seven remake, popped up in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and antagonised a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero in Moon Knight.
He’s never taken top billing, though, but the chance has presented itself more than once. He was considered for the part of Will Graham that eventually went to Edward Norton in Red Dragon, he was in the running for Marvel’s Doctor Strange before Benedict Cumberbatch was cast, and he turned down the chance to replace Michael Keaton as the title hero in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever.
None of them made anywhere near as much money at the box office as his most egregious rejection, which Hawke laughed off as a stupid sci-fi flick with nothing between the ears. In his defence, that’s exactly what it was, but it was also a film that left cinemas as the second highest-grossing release in history behind only Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park when it landed in the summer of 1996.
Hawke was fresh from Ben Stiller’s Gen X touchstone Reality Bites and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise at the time, which, by his own admission, left him feeling a little too big for his boots. He thought mindless fantasy was beneath him, meaning he didn’t even finish reading the screenplay he’d been sent.
“I’m the bee’s knees, right?” Hawke informed Conan O’Brien of his mindset at the time. “I’m driving cross country with a friend of mine, and I got the script to Independence Day. There’s, like, dollar bills attached. I’m reading to my buddy in the car. I’m like, ‘Isn’t this a bad line; ET phone home?’ That’s stupid. You know what I mean?”
The star revealed that he was so dissuaded by what had been sent his way that he couldn’t take it anymore, recalling how he “literally threw it onto the Texas highway” in disgust. Fast forward to Independence Day‘s opening weekend, and he was ready to have his own decision vindicated, assuming that it would be “amusing to see how bad it is.”
Instead, audiences cheered in the aisles for Roland Emmerich’s alien invasion epic, with Hawke hoping to be gently let down by his then-partner. He asked, “It wasn’t that good, was it?” only to be told that “it was really good.” Independence Day‘s $817 million in ticket sales is hard to argue with, leaving the actor dejected after he missed out on the part that solidified Will Smith on the A-list.
