‘The Woman in the Fifth’: The “strange and surreal” movie that challenged Ethan Hawke
Having been a working actor for almost 40 years, it seems reasonable to assume that one of the major reasons why Ethan Hawke tends to alternate his high-profile and high-paying gigs with regular detours into off-kilter and intimate projects is because he’s financially comfortable enough to do so.
The star has been marching to the beat of his own drum for decades, and it’s been reflective of his choices for just as long. Why did he wait until 17 years into his career to appear on television, and why did it happen in a single episode of the spy series Alias, joining a random assortment of guest stars that also included Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, and Ricky Gervais? Nobody really knows except him.
What were his first two ports of call after rounding out one of cinema’s great trilogies with Richard Linklater’s elegiac Before Midnight, which also earned him an Academy Award nomination as its co-writer? That would be the micro-budget horror The Purge and Selena Gomez-starring thriller Getaway, obviously.
Why did he follow the path of so many peers and agree to board the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the villain in the streaming series Moon Knight? Because he asked himself what Paul Newman would have done in a similar situation, which made up his mind that supervillainy was the right thing to do.
The point is that Hawke does what he wants, and nobody’s going to tell him otherwise, which also explains why he was so intrigued by the prospect of working with a Polish auteur who’d never made a movie in the actor’s native America as part of an international co-production that sought to balance eroticism and surrealism with family drama and things going bump in the night he had to say yes.
Those ingredients were enough to make Paweł Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth a risk worth taking, even if he had questions about the more spiritual side of the story. “What is a vision? What is it really? It’s not really going to be a poltergeist,” he told Film Comment. “I haven’t met a poltergeist, but I’ve had visions. I know what they are.”
Ultimately, the production evolved into “an exercise in naturalism” for Hawke, who embraced the offbeat nature of the narrative. “The movie was so surreal and strange that I just tried to make sense of the character for myself, who he was and what he might be experiencing,” he offered. “When a movie is really strange and surreal, and the acting is also surreal, it’s just frosting on frosting.”
The Woman in the Fifth marked yet another experimental sojourn for a performer who has a habit of taking them, and while nobody’s going to have a leg to stand on if they were to call it one of the best movies of his career, Hawke was nonetheless fully committed to executing his director’s vision despite his trepidations on the supernatural subtleties.
