Ethan Hawke
Reality no longer bites for ETHAN HAWKE, whose new movie The Hottest State has critics cheering. Below, the serious star sits in the box seat to discuss love, ladies' men, and life after Una.
Administrator
August 20, 2007
By Whit Stillman
In Tom DeCillo’s cult film Living in Oblivion, the movie-star character Chad Palomino blurts out that he only took the role because he heard the nerd director was “tight with Tarantino.” Who’s tight with whom has become the alpha and omega for getting independent films made—and Ethan Hawke has had especially good luck, or judgment, in this area. Since making Dead Poets Society at age 18, he has been friends with Robert Sean Leonard, who appeared in Hawke’s directorial debut, the micro-budget Chelsea Walls. But his tightest knuckle tap has been with director Richard Linklater. It culminated in six films together (most notably Before Sunrise and 2004’s Before Sunset), as well as Hawke’s own directorial ambitions.
So when the opportunity came up to interview the Oscar-nominated actor (for 2001’s Training Day) about his new film, The Hottest State, which he directed and stars in, I jumped at it. Maybe this was my chance to get tight with the actor-director, too. First off was a trip to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater for one of the last performances of his play, Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.
The Coast of Utopia is either a towering achievement of the theater—it was nominated for ten Tony awards and won seven—or a horrible, sub-intellectual mishmash. In either case, Hawke’s performance as the aristocrat-turned-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin is stunning—the boy from Dead Poets Society and White Fang, an impressive, dominating persona, all grown up. (He was nominated for a Tony, but lost to his scene partner Billy Crudup.) Indicative of this maturity is Hawke’s ambition to direct theater as well as film: For one, he’s helming Jonathan Marc Sherman’s play, The Things We Want, off–Broadway next season.
When I meet Hawke outside his tiny dressing room, he does seem like a good guy, far removed from the annoying Gen-Xer of Reality Bites. Perhaps his divorce in 2004 from Uma Thurman—with whom he has a 5-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter—has added a gravitas to the thoughtfulness he has always shown.
The full interview between Ethan Hawke and Whit Stillman, after the jump!
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