Ethan Hawke likes to have his pockets full when he’s acting. “It’s an old Actors Studio trick,” he says. “You come up with an idea like: the character quit smoking 14 weeks ago, and he still has mints in his pockets or Lifesavers or toothpicks.” What’s actually in there is not so important – it’s about the thoughtfulness of it all. Hawke hates when it looks like an actor has just put on a jacket; he points to Robert De Niro’s Raging Bull performance as the high watermark for a lived-in performance. “It looks like he slept in those clothes. You can smell him. That achievement is a giant collection of tiny, negligible details.” As vengeful abolitionist John Brown in his period miniseries The Good Lord Bird, Hawke stuffed the pockets of his tatty overcoat to the brim. “I wanted bullets, I wanted old beef jerky. He had a pet squirrel – I wanted a piece of that tail.”
It’s the kind of comment that you might be tempted to chuck in an overflowing bin marked “actor bullshit”, but it works for Hawke – it got him in Denzel Washington’s good books on the set of Training Day. Washington, a storied improviser who likes to unsettle his scene partners to keep things fresh, turned to him during an early take and asked what kind of car he drives. Hawke didn’t blink: “A Chevy Tahoe”. Then Washington asked for the keys. Of course, Hawke whipped them out. “It was a test. I could tell he trusted me after that. Our imaginative life just became a little more fully realised.”
Hawke has built a career around this earnest devotion to his craft. His filmography has frequently veered to independent cinema, where he’s found success on the fringes of the mainstream with auteurs like Paul Schrader (who directed him in the climate anxiety drama First Reformed) and Richard Linklater (with whom he made Boyhood and the Before trilogy). Hawke regularly puts his own money into passion projects, like 2018’s Blaze, a heartfelt drama about obscure folk singer Blaze Foley and his best directorial work yet. He’s still trying to get a film adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard off the ground. Today, as we speak, his blue eyes still get big and wide as he talks about those projects – they make him shift forwards in his seat. This is Hawke: the beloved contributor to the culture.
But now, the 51-year-old is making a wholly unexpected foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Moon Knight: a new Disney+ series scraped from the very bottom of Disney’s intellectual property barrel, about a superhero with multiple personality disorder (it helps, obviously, that said hero is played by Oscar Isaac).
A touch of serendipity led to him signing up for the MCU. In the depths of the pandemic – during which Hawke suffered what he calls a “molecular breakdown” thanks to a period of enforced stasis – he had been in talks with Egyptian director Mohamed Diab about working on another small, rewarding indie. Out of the blue, Diab called him and told him that the project was going to be put on hold – something else had come up that would keep him out of action for 18 months or so. Hawke was disappointed, but understood. And yet, the news won’t have soothed his restless soul. “You feel like a cat trying to stay alive,” Hawke says of the microscopic period when he had no work to be getting on with. “The life of an actor can be sabotaged so quickly, you can go out of fashion if you stop contributing or making interesting things. I've always felt like if I'm not hustling, I'm gonna die.” And then, a week after his meeting with Diab, he ran into Oscar Isaac in a coffee shop, who said the words that (almost) every actor wants to hear: “‘I'm doing this Marvel [series], and I really want you to be the bad guy in it.’” The director? Diab, of course.
Marvel projects move quite unlike anything else in Hollywood. Hawke received the offer to star in Moon Knight – as villainous cult leader type Arthur Harrow whom he likens to an evil Carl Jung – later that same day. There were no scripts yet, just vibes. But the involvement of Isaac and Diab was enough to convince Hawke to take the plunge. “[It was like], all right, this is meant to be. I didn’t think that much about it.”
The press did. “Ethan Hawke deigns to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe”, one outlet jibed, making reference to comments Hawke had made about MCU-adjacent superhero film Logan in 2018. “It’s a great superhero movie. It still involves people in tights with metal coming out of their hands,” Hawke said at the time. “It’s not [celebrated French director] Bresson. It’s not [Ingrid] Bergman. But they talk about it like it is.”
Over the years, Hawke has spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between commerce and art, and what success should look like to an artist. In Reality Bites, his character Troy represents creative purity for filmmaker Lelaina (Winona Ryder), whose vision is hampered by editors at a big TV network. In his 2021 novel, A Bright Ray of Darkness, the narrator William Harding – a stand-in for Hawke himself – says: “The dumber the movie, the more they pay.” His interest in Blaze Foley seems to stem from a fascination with artists satisfied by creation alone. In the film, Foley plays in mostly empty bars to hostile audiences, both unaware and uninterested in his talent. Recently, Hawke made a documentary about Hollywood power couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. When scrubbing through the footage, he found himself struggling to watch an idol of his do an advertisement for Maxwell House. “There's something that makes me sad seeing him do a coffee ad. Like, don't do it. Don't do it! Because you know, he's the first of many dominoes to fall. Because they don't pay you for nothing. They're buying your image.”
Since Hawke’s comments on Logan, the debate over the soul of filmmaking has raged on, with Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola coming out as the great defenders of capital-C Cinema. “I know what Scorsese and Coppola are talking about. They're talking about, are we making movies for adults anymore? A 12-year-old isn't gonna mine One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for all it's worth.” (Hawke saw it on his fifth birthday. “I have visceral memories of wondering what the hell it meant when that Native American threw the sink through the window and charged into the woods. [That] stayed with me forever.”)
For the most part, Hawke’s views haven’t changed. He still prefers movies about real people and real issues to superhero movies – but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t see the merits in what Marvel Studios does. “Is Eternals Chloé Zhao's best movie? Probably not. Is it fantastic? Yes. I loved it.” He remains worried about the future of entertainment. “I get scared when things get less director-driven. I'm scared of streaming, I can't stand the word content. It starts to make me feel like we're devising a world like Wall-E where people drink smoothies and just press play. I don’t want to be a part of that.”
All of this might seem to shape up as a moral quandary for Hawke, the humble craftsman. But he’s got such a warm-hearted enthusiasm for film and film-lovers that he has resolved to try to colour within the lines for a while. “My daughter Maya said something really wise about it. [She said] ‘We love the movies. And I want people to go to the movies. And I love it when audiences love movies, and if this is what they love, then we have to do a good job.’ She's working on Stranger Things. I'm working on Moon Knight. You can't sit there in judgement about what is high art and what is not high art. I want people to love just going to the movies, and this is what they love. And let's try to make them as good as possible.”
When he signed up for Moon Knight, he told TV podcast The Watch that his aim was to see if he could bring some of his own artistic sensibilities to the project. Now that all is said and done, does he think he succeeded? There’s a limit to the kind of changes you can make in such a well-oiled multi-billion dollar machine, but he feels like they made a good go of it. “You can’t walk into their restaurant and start telling them you want to make lentil patties, and they want to make a beautiful steak the way that they want to make it. You're gonna make the movies that Kevin Feige believes feel connected to his universe. But we wanted to give ourselves the chance to succeed.”
He continues: “Oscar [Isaac] and I come from a kind of similar school of thought about this. Put simply, we're both aspiring to be old-school New York actors. Oscar really likes to rehearse. And he really likes to think about things. We’re more like carpenters about it.” Rehearsals and read-throughs, he says, are not so much a thing in the Marvel universe. But they managed to convince Feige and co to let them do their thing. “I know that Oscar and I feel better about that. We worked harder on it. And we were able to do more of what we wanted to do.”
His other big project out next month, The Northman, directed by surrealist auteur Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse), sounds much more up his street. “It’s like you found some epic Viking poem that's 700 years old and brought it to life,” he says. It also gave him the opportunity to work with a hero of his – fellow comic book movie interloper, Willem Dafoe – for the second time. “We have one amazing scene. We get naked and do some kind of Viking acid and howl at the moon together. And oh my god, if you have to be naked and howl at the moon, he's a great person to do it with.”
On the set of Moon Knight, Hawke kept just one item in his pocket: broken glass. Which reminds us of another of his acting anecdotes – one of his favourite nights ever on stage (he has regularly worked in theatre throughout his 35-year career). “We were doing a wedding scene and I accidentally broke my champagne glass and cut my hand open. But everybody stayed on point. They kept having their cues.” One of the other actors got him a rag and others began to clean the shards off the floor. Someone else cleaned up the wound. Triumph, clenched from the jaws of disaster. “I'm telling you, the audience was hypnotised. Because it was like they were watching real life – and a tremendous amount of planning went into that level of spontaneity.”
Some of Hawke’s most heartfelt performances have come in near-empty theatres. In the early 1990s – right around the time his star was rising post-Dead Poets Society – Hawke’s theatre troupe Malaparte had a few not-so-popular runs off-Broadway. There would sometimes be more people in the company than the audience. If anything, it made them work harder. “You're on stage crying and screaming, you're like, ‘I gotta give them my best, right?’” he says. “I’ve done some shows on Broadway that didn't do well. And when you're in a 1,200-seat house, and there are 120 people there, you feel like a loser. You have to focus so hard on those 120 people, because if you fall into self-pity, then they might as well leave.”
The issue we’re circling is both literal and philosophical: can he still derive the same pleasure from a performance if there’s barely anyone there to experience it? “Absolutely,” he says, before segueing into an anecdote about the late Oscar-winner Paul Scofield. “At the end of his life, he still acted, but he did it at the little church theatre close to where he lived. [Someone] said, ‘Why wouldn’t you be in the West End where everyone could see you?’ And Scofield said, ‘You know, I've really only been performing for my maker my whole life.’ We're all building sandcastles anyway, you know?” Hawke has been around long enough to know that popularity is not the healthiest measure for artistic fulfilment. “You want to connect with people. But a lot of mediocre stuff gets seen by a lot of people. So that can't be the bar.”
As our conversation concludes, he gets up, he shakes my hand, and puts his wide-brimmed movie star hat back on. “I’m gonna sneak off and see The Batman,” he says. His son has told him it’s an absolute must-see on the big screen. Then Hawke turns around and heads out into the wet London night: a fan on his way to the movies.
Moon Knight is out on Disney+ on Wednesday 30 March. The Northman is in UK cinemas on 15 April.
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