Ethan Hawke has been making movies for four decades, and yet he’s never been better than he is in Blue Moon.
A complex character study about Lorenz Hart, whose twenty-five year partnership with Richard Rodgers resulted in some of the 20th-century’s most memorable musical-theater hits (“Blue Moon,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine”), the actor’s ninth collaboration with director Richard Linklater is as multifaceted as its subject and his songs, at once joyous and sad, intelligent and playful, theatrical and cinematic.
Set over the course of a single evening at New York’s legendary Sardi’s, during which Lorenz is forced to contend with the opening-night success of Rodgers and new partner Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, it’s a love letter to a bygone Broadway era and to a complicated man whose gifts were as great as his failings.
One of the year’s best, Blue Moon, which hits theaters Oct. 17, is a sterling showcase for its headliner, whose physical transformation only enhances his soulful evocation of Hart’s insecurities, anger, and agony. Faced with the loss of the creative relationship that defined his career, Hawke’s Hart is a giant talent wrought small by sorrow, bitterness, and desperate need.
Through conversations with Sardi’s bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and piano player Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees), as well as Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley)—the last of whom he’s obsessed with, despite the fact that he’s quite clearly gay—the star captures a piercing sense of his internal collapse. Given that a prologue reveals that Hart is not long for this world, the film operates under a funereal pall, and Hawke’s brilliant performance is all the more tragic for brimming with such full-bodied life.
Arriving amidst his stellar work on FX’s The Lowdown—and on the same day as his villainous turn in Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2—Blue Moon is a reminder that Hawke is one of American cinema’s most eclectic and electric leading men, and it should earn him considerable awards consideration in the months ahead.
Before he’s swept up in that hullabaloo, however, we spoke with him about reconnecting with Linklater, what he’s learned over the course of his career, and keeping things varied both in front of and behind the camera.
This is your ninth collaboration with Richard Linklater. Aren’t you sick of him yet? What makes your creative partnership continue to hum?
Great question. To be totally honest, it’s kind of like, if you think too hard about riding a bicycle, you fall on your ass. It’s fun. I like it. It has balance. I’m doing it. I try not to think about it!
That said, getting sick of your friends seems to me like…I know people say that, but friendship, to me, is the reason to live. If friends can keep challenging you, and they keep growing, and you feel seen by them…
You want to keep returning to them.
I remember when I was younger, like my third or fourth collaboration with Rick, I equated it to this. When you work with somebody over and over again, it’s like you’re on a baseball team, it’s the ninth inning, there’s one out left, and the coach is like, if we have any chance to win this game, the next batter up really matters—put Hawke in. What that does is you think, wow, they believe in me. That belief creates confidence. The coach thinks if anybody’s going to get a hit, it’s me, so I deserve to be up here.
It really is a great confidence builder. Rick first sent me the Blue Moon script ten years ago, and I was like, let’s do it. He’s like, you’re not old enough. My first thought is, oh, who’s he going to cast? But he didn’t think of somebody else. He thought, no, let’s just wait ten years. Nobody thinks like that. Who do you know on planet Earth who thinks like that?
Did being older help your performance? Ten years is a big difference.
It is a big difference. When you’re 42, you can kind of pass for 35. But when you’re 54, you can’t pass for 35 anymore. It doesn’t fly that way.
You don’t know what you don’t know, right? What I’ve learned about acting in the last 10 years…these have been some of the most interesting years of my life as a performer. What I learned playing John Brown [in The Good Lord Bird], what I learned playing Chet Baker [in Born to Be Blue], what I learned doing Maudie, has been really interesting.
The last 10 years have been a lot more character work for me than the first 25 years of my career. I didn’t know that was going to happen. Maybe Rick knew it was going to happen, or at least thought it might. So it’s not just the aging process that time takes care of all by itself, but it’s what I’ve learned in the last 10 years.
What is it that you learned?
When I was younger, I was really only interested in naturalism. Playing Larry Hart, it required voice and speech work, it required movement work, it required me changing the way I look. The things I learned about hair and makeup in the last 10 years were invaluable. There are so many ways in which the time was made valuable, not least of which was just that it was smart of Rick, the way that we worked on the script.
It really is a dense and amazing script.
This script, in my opinion, deserves awards. It was a phenomenal piece of writing, just as a text. And it didn’t happen by accident. Robert [Kaplow] worked for a long time on this script. The bullseye of this target is so small. Ninety minutes, real time, 1943, the opening night party of Oklahoma!, go! And by the end of it, you’re going to know the main character is going to die! That is hard to write, and he makes it look effortless and seamless and one conversation flows into the next. So that entire decade was spent well.
How much did you know about Lorenz Hart before the film?
I was super lucky because Robert Kaplow wrote the book Me and Orson Welles that Rick made a movie out of 17 years ago, and I became friends with him. Then he sent us the script, and we started working on it. So I had years. He sent me the biography of Lorenz Hart, A Ship Without a Sail, nine years ago. I had time to listen to all the music, and every now and then there’d be some new definitive article about the Rodgers and Hart breakup, and I would get an email from Robert. It all percolated.
You undergo quite a physical transformation in Blue Moon. Is it difficult to do that sort of thing and not let it overwhelm the performance? Or does it enhance your ability to embody the character?
Both. Obviously, you want to get it right, so the audience doesn’t think about it. We understand to a certain extent that I’m trying to do a magic trick that’s impossible, because the audience already knows that I’m not Larry Hart, and I’m not five feet tall. So you’re dealing with an obstacle, and you have to try to make it fun.
But you also have to do it so effortlessly that they stop thinking about it, because then it’ll be an impediment. Nobody wants to watch you work. They want to watch you party and have a great time and make it seem effortless. We knew we had to get it right, so you just accept it. I like to think that by the time it’s over, you’re not thinking about it at all.
Was part of the appeal of Blue Moon that Rodgers and Hart were hugely successful, and yet—because of Rodgers’ more illustrious partnership with Oscar Hammerstein—few people know much about him?
It was so wonderful. When you’re doing a biopic, even Chet Baker’s hard because people have an idea of what they think Chet Baker looks and sounds like because they’ve heard him and seen pictures and posters all their life.
There’s a certain ring you have to kiss, and there’s certain iconography you can bend but can’t break. Whereas Larry Hart, nobody knows anything about him. We could build a character that suited our script, suited our story, and we could inform it with as much knowledge as we had, but we’re not bumping up against preconceived notions.
Even if you do the Johnny Cash story, people will think, Johnny Cash would never say it like that! And what do they know about Johnny Cash? They don’t know what he sounded like when he wasn’t being interviewed. So it was fun to have so much material to draw from, and no preconceived ideas.
On top of Blue Moon, you just premiered Highway 99: A Double Album (about Merle Haggard) at the Telluride Film Festival, you’re headlining The Lowdown (on FX), and you also have Black Phone 2 on the way. Is that diversity something you’re always actively searching for?
Yeah, they’re in completely different keys. I think a lot of the people that care about Black Phone 2 are not going to see Blue Moon [laughs]. I don’t know to what extent there’s a crossover audience.
It’s me!
You and me both [laughs]. It’s strange how the life of an actor works. I’ve been doing this, spinning outside my lane, since I was in my early twenties. What’s weird is, this is all a reflection of at least five years’ worth of work that for some reason has accumulated and is coming out at the same time.
What is it that drives you at this point in your career?
It’s just such a turn-on to have all these projects that are so different. All the ones you just mentioned, my God, they couldn’t be more different.
Being on set with Scott Derrickson, trying to figure out how to make a scary midnight movie, is very different than the Lorenz Hart story, and very different from what it takes to do eight episodes of The Lowdown and to try to paint on a big canvas like that. I get to use all these different parts of my brain, and to use the education that I’ve gotten over the last 25 years of doing this.
The Haggard doc is a different part of my brain, and the wonderful thing about documentaries is that they’re a slow burn. You can work on that for five years. Making a documentary is more like writing a novel or a nonfiction piece in that you’re never finished with it; you just decide to stop working on it at some point. I feel lucky that all these different parts of my brain get to be used, and they keep me from getting jaded and bored. It feels really rewarding.
I’m not tired of working with Linklater. I can’t wait to work with Rick again. If I had one more movie to make, I’d want it to be with him, you know? And I hope we get to do a season two of The Lowdown. My brain is still churning.
Is a tenth collaboration with Richard in the cards?
Oh, sure. The best is yet to come, man!
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