The three roles Ethan Hawke cherishes the most: “The ones I am most fond of”
If you haven’t seen the 2021 horror The Black Phone starring Ethan Hawke, then it comes highly recommended, especially with the sequel hitting cinemas this week.
A superbly effective mix of Stranger Things retro spookiness and outright gory terror, it was a word-of-mouth hit that was based on a short story by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill. Hawke is fantastic as the terrifying protagonist ‘The Grabber’, and it wouldn’t be hyperbole to say the actor is at his creative peak at the moment, flitting from one genre to another, from big screen to small screen, excelling at each and adding more and more plaudits to a career that stretches all the way back to Robin Williams’ Dead Poets Society in 1989.
He is also going to be seen this week as the lead in long-time collaborator Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, the story of Lorenz Hart, the former partner of Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame), as he sits in a Manhattan bar in 1943, bitterly reflecting on that night’s opening of the hit musical Oklahoma!, penned by his old friend Oscar Hammerstein.
It marks the ninth time that Hawke and Linklater have worked together in a partnership that includes the romantic drama Before Sunrise, some 30 years ago and Boyhood, the critically acclaimed coming of age story that was filmed uniquely over a 12-year span with the same acting protagonist.
Still only 54, Hawke has also this year released the TV show The Lowdown with Peter Dinklage, which generated rave reviews, and took the lead in She Dances, a film about a father trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter.
Hawke has never been an actor happy to stay in his lane or take on safe roles in big-budget movies, and that is clearly a driving factor in his career. When asked about the parts he has played both onscreen and on-stage, he told Cellophaneland, “The truth is that the most challenging characters are often the ones I am most fond of. On stage, it would probably be Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Chekhov’s Ivanov. On film, it would have to be my role of John Brown, based on a true character, redrawn in a delightful way for a powerful and funny novel.”
While Hawke spent some of the early 1990s on Broadway, where he took on the Chekhov role, that last part was for a 2020 miniseries called The Good Lord Bird that passed many people by but attracted a good deal of acclaim on release. Adapted from a 2013 novel, it told the story of an American Civil War-era anti-slavery figure who leads a raid on an armoury held by US Marines.
Hawke shows no signs of letting up with four more movies on the way, including Revolver with his daughter Maya, which focuses on the story of a mega-fan trying to break into The Beatles’ hotel in the 1960s in the hopes of meeting George Harrison. Then there’s a film with Hawke starring opposite Gladiator legend Russell Crowe called The Weight, in which an army veteran during the American Great Depression attempts to smuggle gold across a wilderness in order to help his family.
Linklater, meanwhile, also has some very interesting projects coming up to keep an eye on, chief of which may well be a Bill Hicks biopic about the late great stand-up comedian, which has been in development for almost ten years, but apparently may also star Crowe in an important role.
