“It was terrible”: when Ethan Hawke’s attempt at selling out didn’t go to plan
Ethan Hawke has always been a fierce advocate of independent cinema and creative innovation, but at the end of the day, everybody has bills that need to be paid.
Whether it’s his decades-long collaborations with Richard Linklater on projects like Boyhood and the Before trilogy or his work with intimate auteurs like Pedro Almodóvar, Robert Eggers and Paul Schrader, Hawke has built his career on making surprising choices that showcase the wide spectrum of his talents.
While that decision to work on each project seems confident and well-considered, Hawke has faced up to the challenges of finding a balance between commercial and independent films and the times in which that balance hasn’t been found.
He might be best known for his love and unwavering passion for independent cinema, but he has made some interesting choices over the years that have temporarily thrown his filmography into flux. A selection of horrors and thrillers such as The Purge, The Black Phone, Getaway, and 24 Hours to Live seems slightly out of place for someone so pivotal within the indie movement, but it keeps him gainfully employed.
When quizzed on those career choices, Hawke singled out a Razzie-nominated genre film as the biggest offender. Admitting to The Guardian that he took the role for no other reason than the money, he discovered himself increasingly unwilling to make the compromise of selling his soul in favour of an easy paycheque.
“This is the biggest struggle of my life, to be honest. I never know to what extent I have to feed the snake, you know,” he explained. “The times in my life I’ve tried to sell out have failed miserably. I did this Angelina Jolie horror film thinking it would be a big hit, and it was terrible. When I’ve followed my heart, it goes well”.
Directed by DJ Caruso, Taking Lives follows Jolie’s FBI agent as she works with an art dealer to track a serial killer. Hawke doesn’t appear to be someone who struggles with authenticity or staying true to his creative voice, but his comments revealed the pressure that Hawke feels to both “feed the snake” and maintain his professional beliefs.
In the Hollywood system, it’s a double-edged sword; to maintain a public image that allows you to make the smaller movies you care about, actors sometimes have to work on bigger projects that might not reflect their typical style or creative voice. It’s a conundrum that many thespians deal with, even if Hawke has never stood out as an actor obsessed with the bottom line.
His work regularly strikes a fine balance between both mainstream and niche cinema, but always with a palpable sense of heart in each project, regardless of the audience he’s making it for. Perhaps the reason why his less favoured performances still feel so true to Hawke as an actor, Taking Lives being one of the exceptions, is because he rarely stars in anything just for the sake of it.
