Ethan Hawke Waited His Whole Life to Make ‘Blue Moon’

I wondered if Ethan Hawke would be able to walk into a crowded diner and have lunch with me. It’s the first weekend of the 2025 Toronto Film Festival, and the city is overflowing with cinephiles—many of whom are intimately familiar with Hawke thanks to Reality Bites or Gattaca or his Oscar-nominated turn in Training Day or his Oscar-nominated turn in Boyhood.

But Hawke may be best known to this crowd for the work he’s done during his decades-long collaboration with filmmaker Richard Linklater. Their partnership began in 1995 with the romantic drama Before Sunrise, starring Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers who meet on a train and roam Vienna for the night, and its two sequels: Before Sunset in 2004 and Before Midnight in 2013. Hawke and Linklater have done nine projects over 30 years.

The ninth, Blue Moon, is why they are at TIFF, just days after the film played at the Telluride Film Festival. (There’s another reason as well—but we’ll get to that later.) They’ve been trying to make Blue Moon—which follows iconic lyricist Lorenz Hart (Hawke) on the opening night of Oklahoma!, a musical written by Hart’s longtime collaborator Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney)—for more than a decade. The film, which hits theaters on October 17, unfolds practically in real time as Hart tries to hide the deep heartbreak he feels when his closest collaborator makes a hit without him.

Hart is a departure for Hawke. The lyricist is charming—but Hart was also a short man with a combover wallowing in sadness while obsessing over a beautiful woman (Margaret Qualley), even though it’s widely known that he’s queer. Nearly the entire movie takes place in one location—the iconic Sardi’s restaurant in the heart of the Theater District—and Hawke is tasked with delivering rapid-fire dialogue for nearly the entire film. It’s an incredible performance, and one that challenged Hawke like Linklater has never challenged him before.

“This is the hardest we’ve ever worked,” says Hawke. “He was hell-bent to not lean on our friendship and hope for the best. He pushed me further than anybody’s pushed me in years.”

Hawke and Linklater did their first reading of Robert Kaplow’s script about 10 years ago at Hawke’s house. They would revisit it every few years, but the timing never seemed right. Linklater had work to do on the script; Hawke had some growing up to do. “It was preparing a meal really slowly, making sure you have all the right ingredients and trying to see what was required from the other parts,” says Hawke. “And so by the time we were ready, we were really ready.”

When I moderated a Blue Moon panel at the Telluride Film Festival a week before our conversation, Hawke charmed the audience with a story about how Linklater kept telling him he was too young and too good-looking to play the role of Lorenz Hart—until recently.

“I told that kind of jokey story, but he also knew that I was actually going to get more right for the part as time went by,” Hawke says, “And that it’s a script that needs to be carefully nurtured because if we showed up on set with the script not being right, the movie wasn’t going to work.”

Linklater couldn’t have known that Hawke’s other projects would help mold him into this role. For a long time, Hawke resisted the idea of using external devices such as makeup or hair to find a character. “I wanted everything to be as honest as could be,” he says. But for the 2020 miniseries The Good Lord Bird, he committed to a major transformation: a frizzy beard and hair, and a face that looked constantly dirty. The experience changed his mind. “I kind of realized what an arbitrary, fake sense of honesty that is. There’s so much more that’s universal about our experience, and all these things that I was counting as my personality were actually artifice—what kind of clothes you wear, the way in which you speak,” he says.

Playing the five-foot-tall balding genius in Blue Moon meant Hawke “had to totally dismantle my vanity,” he says, “and I’ve been having a lot of fun with that.” He shaved off his signature locks and donned a combover, a hairstyle that seemed poignant. “The thing about combovers, particularly for people who aren’t tall, is that they’re looking at themselves in the mirror and they think it looks good—and they don’t know that everybody is looking down on the top of their head,” he says.

Hart loves to banter—entertaining the Sardi’s bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and pianist (Jonah Lees) with colorful stories throughout the movie. Though he comes off as confident, there’s a lot of insecurity and hurt just below the surface. Hart gradually realizes that his alcoholism has unraveled his longtime partnership with Rogers, with whom he wrote more than 500 songs, including “Blue Moon” and “The Lady Is a Tramp,” as well as stage shows like Babes in Arms, The Boys From Syracuse, and I Married an Angel. “It’s kind of a story of a guy who dies of a broken heart,” says Hawke. “And so the pain had to be real and deep.”

Hawke’s Hart spends a lot of his time and energy focused on Elizabeth Weiland, a beautiful young woman who has clearly friend-zoned him. Though his obsession is confusing to those around him—it’s a pretty open secret that Hart is gay—it made perfect sense to Hawke. “He thinks he’s hurt about this woman, but he can’t really look at the real wound,” the actor says. “He was a person who was probably in a lot of pain as a young man, and now his best friend was breaking up with him.”

Though he didn’t realize it at the time, Hawke spent his whole career training for the demands of this role. Before Sunrise taught Hawke how to perform demanding dialogue without losing the audience’s attention. “Most film actors aren’t asked to talk that much,” he says. “That’s something you can’t unlearn once you feel what that’s like—it’s like breaking through a wall or something.” Hawke and Linklater’s 2001 film Tape was similarly dialogue-heavy and set in just one location (a motel room in Lansing, Michigan). “That’s the first time I became an adult actor,” Hawke says. “Something happened on that movie that got me ready for Training Day.”

If Hawke had never played Macbeth (in a Broadway revival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 2013), he also wouldn’t have been ready for Blue Moon. All roads have led him here. “The guy who was in Reality Bites was not ready to do this movie,” he says. “And it’s fun to watch yourself learn—that feels really good.”

In the end, our lunch is mostly uninterrupted; only one person stops to talk to Hawke, though I catch a few who try to hover nearby or walk very slowly by our table. Hawke says he and Linklater are in Toronto not only to promote Blue Moon, but also because they’re trying to finance their next collaboration. He won’t say much else, other than that the project is set in the 19th century, and they’ve been discussing it even longer than Blue Moon—since 1998. “When you say 19th century, it sounds like it’s going to be boring, but it’s not,” Hawke says. “It’s revolutionary, like Boyhood or Waking Life or the Before trilogy. It’s much more Linklater’s version of what’s happened to us in regards to our belief in equality and our identity as Americans.”

They’ve been singing for their supper—a.k.a. meeting with financiers—and Hawke says the fate of the film “hangs in the balance as we speak.” It’s bewildering to him that someone with Linklater’s history—the auteur behind Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Boyhood—still has to fight this way. “It’s so strange to watch all these people fawn over him and not give him the money to make another movie,” he says. “It makes you want to punch people in the face. It’s very confusing.”

But Hawke is never going to lose hope. “We’re going to get it made,” he says firmly. “The question is, are we going to get it made in 6 months, in 18 months, or someday?” Though there are no guarantees in Hollywood, Hawke should be confident. As he, Linklater, and Blue Moon prove, there’s a right time for everything.