Ethan Hawke has always been an actor full of surprises. In the course of his prolific career, he’s veered from prestige drama to quirky comedy to full-on horror, embracing each role with the same dedication. And this year has brought a particularly unlikely convergence of projects. In Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” he uncannily embodies real-life songwriter Lorenz Hart, a man of many contradictions. On the FX series “The Lowdown,” created by Hawke’s pal Sterlin Harjo, he’s Lee Raybon, a reckless journalist. And in “Black Phone 2,” he’s a serial killer haunting children from beyond the grave.
“It makes you believe in astrology or something,” Hawke says, speaking over Zoom from New York City. “All these disparate parts of my life are being released at the same time. I’ve been so worried about this whole aging process. But the great thing about it is that the roles get a lot more complicated. They get fewer, but the ones you get are complicated and interesting. I feel astonished to have been doing this job for 30 years and have two of the best parts I’ve ever had this year.”
It’s even more astonishing when you realize Hawke has been planning to play Hart for over a decade. While Hawke and Linklater were making their 2014 film “Boyhood,” the filmmaker sent Hawke a piece of writing by Robert Kaplow about the opening night of the Broadway musical “Oklahoma!” It wasn’t a script, exactly. More like a short story, recounting the evening from Hart’s point of view as he reconciles with the fact that his former creative partner Richard Rodgers has created a hit with Oscar Hammerstein.
“It struck me as one of the most brilliant ideas I’d ever heard, of what it would be like to be Lorenz Hart at that opening night party,” Hawke recalls. “It’s all of humanity inside this little evening.”
Over the next few years, Linklater, Hawke and Kaplow worked together to build what became “Blue Moon,” an intimate, evocative film that takes place just months before Hart’s death. They held numerous readings, and eventually Linklater said, “Let’s make this movie.” After shooting the pilot episode of “The Lowdown” in Omaha, Hawke shaved his head and flew to Dublin. He felt an unshakable desire to play Hart, who reminded him of many of the men he’d met in theater when he first started acting.
“There was something so human about him,” Hawke says. “On this night where he’s being broken up with by the most important person in his life, he somehow decides that he’s in love with a young woman who doesn’t like him back. It’s such a peculiar human twist. The pain of losing Richard Rodgers is almost too great to be looked at. He’s got to come up with a new pain that he can make sense of.”
Much has already been made of Hawke’s performance, which required a physical transformation alongside the actor’s emotional excavation. Hart was notoriously short, at least a foot below Hawke’s own height. Linklater achieved the illusion using only practical effects. “We knew it was going to be old-school stage craft,” Hawke says. “So sometimes it was the set, sometimes it was angles and sometimes it was raising other people up. We asked ourselves, ‘What would Charlie Chaplin do?’”
Hawke felt like he was pulling together everything he’s learned as an actor in three decades. He describes the role as “using everything” and compares it to training for years to nail an “elaborate ski jump.”
“It was a great moment in my life,” he says. “I had really wanted to play this part and I don’t think there’s another director in the world that would have cast me as Hart. [Linklater] did because he knows me so well, but I also didn’t want to let him down. When I first saw the finished cut of the film, it was a huge relief.”
Playing Lee in “The Lowdown” was less of an overt challenge. Hawke says he doesn’t know if he’s ever done a character further away from himself than Hart. That was not the case with Lee, a role Harjo wrote specifically for the actor. “Lee’s right up my alley,” Hawke says. “In an alternate universe, I feel like that is me.”
After finishing “Blue Moon,” Hawke filmed “Black Phone 2” while his hair grew back out. He then returned to Omaha to shoot the rest of “The Lowdown,” an experience he calls “a lot of work but really fun.” He loved the broad canvas of television and the amount of time he had to uncover Lee, a guy who is searching for the best way to be a good man in a corrupt world.
“I loved playing a character who didn’t want to get in a fight and who could act hurt,” Hawke says. “Often you’re asked to play these tough guys and it doesn’t really bother them when they get punched in the face. Lee could cry. That seemed more believable to me.”
Hawke claims to have an “allergy to sequels,” but it was an easy yes from him when Scott Derrickson called with an idea about how to follow-up his successful 2021 film “The Black Phone.” It’s an example of how much Hawke likes to keep both himself and his audience guessing. (In fact, he says he would do third film if Derrickson had a good concept.) The actor recalls people in Hollywood finding his desire to do highly varied roles “irritating” when he was younger.
“Generally, people are more comfortable when they know exactly what you are and what your thing is, and if you keep changing your thing it’s confusing,” he says. “But it’s always been interesting to me to do different things. It makes acting really exciting to me to keep shaking it up. Each thing has its own geometry and math, and that keeps you really engaged.”
There have been moments in his career when Hawke has become tired of acting. But when that happens, he pivots. He’s made documentaries, directed and written novels. He first met Harjo when they collaborated on an adaptation of a graphic novel Hawke had written, “Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars.” But he always comes back to performing.
“Everything for me is a way of maintaining a beginner’s mind,” he says. “I’m always putting myself in situations where I’m not an expert. But the center of the wheel for me has always been acting. Everything is serving that. I’ve always felt if you really want to be a good actor, you have to understand all the ancillary parts.”
Spending time with men like Hart and Lee, as different as they are, reminded Hawke of an inevitable truth. That as humans, we are more alike than we are dissimilar.
“The great joy and interest in performance is the ongoing realization that we are not as unique as we think we are,” Hawke says. “And that our ability for empathy and understanding is really powerful. We can expand our sense of self a lot more than we think we can. You see all these different kinds of people, bad guys and good guys, and this thing that we hold as identity is wildly more flexible than first imagined. Every time I play a part that asks a lot of me, I walk away feeling that if there was an empathy meter inside of me it has expanded its power.”
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