“Do you ever watch athletes’ retirement press conferences?” Ethan Hawke asked over a cappuccino. “Imagine if I told you this whole career that you’ve been working for is over between 38 and 42. You’re going to have to completely reset your life and all you’ve cared about is playing baseball or throwing a touchdown.”
To Hawke, those announcements are as sad and moving as any Beckett play.
“It’s like somebody at their own funeral,” he said. “They don’t know who they are anymore and they have no idea what tomorrow’s going to bring, and it’s terrifying.”
You might not expect Hawke to have so much empathy for athletes forced into early retirement: After all, at 55 he just earned his third nomination for an acting Oscar, this one as the star of Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon.” It’s the latest milestone in a decades-long career featuring films like “Reality Bites,” “Training Day,” and a nine-movie collaboration with Linklater, which includes “Boyhood” and the “Before Sunrise” trilogy.
But when I met Hawke recently at a West Hollywood hotel, he admitted that after his breakthrough in “Dead Poets Society” at 18, he began worrying that his success could evaporate overnight. “As a young man, I had a pathological obsession with making sure I was safe,” he said.
That anxiety helped shape his performance in “Blue Moon,” in which he plays an artist whose best days are long gone. Set over one booze-soaked night in 1943, the film stars Hawke as the lyricist Lorenz Hart, whose fruitful partnership with the composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) has fallen apart because of Hart’s alcoholism. Rodgers has begun collaborating with a new songwriter, Oscar Hammerstein II, and at the opening-night party for their new musical “Oklahoma!” at Sardi’s, Hart must confront the painful reality that his former partner — and perhaps the world at large — have moved on without him.
Though Hart and Hawke are both natural-born storytellers, that’s about where the similarities end: To play the diminutive and not particularly dashing Hart, Hawke shaved his head, adopted an unflattering combover, and altered his posture to embody a man who stood just 5 feet tall but had enough presence to captivate an entire room. Linklater first approached Hawke for the project a decade ago but wanted to wait until the actor was older and could more convincingly convey a lifetime of bittersweet regret.
“There’s so much of my life that I was able to put into ‘Blue Moon,’ and it’s such a wonderful profession that way,” Hawke said. “You can use your own joys and heartbreaks and relationships to educate you, then put it in service of something else.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
This character is very different from any role you’ve played before. Why do you think Linklater thought of you for it?
He knew there’s nothing I like more than sitting in a bar all night, talking nonstop. Also, the feeling of being left behind has been a nagging anxiety my whole life. Being a young actor, you think, “When is the spotlight going to move on and will I survive it?” When Rick and I were first becoming friends, I’d had early fame and I was incredibly suspicious about the ways it dips you in formaldehyde and asks you to stop growing. He thought this part might speak to me because it’s something I live in absolute fear of.
Can you tell when the spotlight moves on from you to some other guy?
Oh, the ways that other people interact with you are so obvious. There’s a buzz that happened in my life with “Dead Poets Society” [1989], then it would go quiet. Then “Reality Bites” [1994] would come out and the buzz is back. The heat of the spotlight is something a person feels, but I learned pretty early that some of the best periods of my life were when that buzz had quieted down. That’s a great teacher because then you stop acting out of fear. You have to let yourself shed skins and make mistakes and try again.
And you’ve always stayed busy.
I think part of my obsession with making documentaries, doing theater and writing novels is making sure that nobody can take this away from me — I’ve learned enough that I’ll find another way to contribute. The thing about acting is you’re only as good as your opportunity, and you’re always hustling for a part or a good collaborator. I’ve always been jealous of the Charlie Parkers of the world who can go in a stairwell and practice for three years. I could go sit in the stairwell and work on Shakespeare all I want, but if I don’t get cast as King Lear, I can’t crush it.
I can’t think of many directors like Linklater who’d have the confidence — or the temerity — to wait a decade for you to grow into this part.
It’s unique, isn’t it? Everybody’s hustling so hard and he’s just not.
But you’re now seeking financing for your 10th film together. Is that still a hustle?
Oh, it’s a grind. It’d be easier if we were going to make “Before Sunrise 4,” a known quantity, but Rick does things that don’t have an obvious comparison. I went through all this with him with “Boyhood,” and it was incredibly hard to talk to a studio executive about how they’re going to make a lot of money in 13 years. They would always be like, “I’m going to be fired by then.”
Does a new Oscar nomination help you secure finances?
It better! There’s no better way to take meetings than to start with them having to congratulate you. That’s really the design of our whole Machiavellian chess game.
How difficult is it to get films like “Blue Moon” made now?
The biggest difference is the way the canvas size has changed. There’s so much talk about whether a movie’s going to be bought for theatrical release or Netflix, or whether you could make this a limited series. And of course, the answer is always yes, all that is possible. I mean, take your favorite movies. Could we make “Casablanca” a limited series? I guess we could. Would it be better? I often feel like it’s just pouring water into beer and seeing how long it still gives you a little bit of a buzz.
I gave Peter Weir his lifetime achievement award at Venice last year. They were screening “Master and Commander,” and he was checking out the print and it was perfect because of course it would be, it’s a digital print. He felt like he’d made some Faustian bargain where he was told, “At the end of your life, all your films will be preserved perfectly and available to everyone all over the world at any instant. Do you accept?” And he’d go, “Yes, of course.” Then the bargain is, “But nobody’s going to care about movies.”
Ouch.
That’s what he feels. He’s like, “Great, I have the perfect print of ‘Master and Commander,’ but now everybody watches and goes, ‘That should be a limited series.’”
Do you ever think that you were a young actor in film at the last best time that was possible?
What’s the Woody Allen movie, “Midnight in Paris,” where every generation thinks that? Part of me also thinks, well, sometimes they’re right. It’s not lost on me how much the industry is subtly changing all the time. There’s no genie in charge with malevolent intent, and some of those repercussions are going to be wildly positive, so I do feel really grateful that I’ve been able to work in the era that I have. I’m trying not to just throw up my arms and say, “Everything’s commercially driven.”
But there have still been some big changes. You couldn’t shoot a small, one-location film like “Blue Moon” in the U.S. now. You had to go to Ireland for it to be financially viable.
Yeah. The best example I have is the “Before” trilogy. “Before Sunrise” [1995] was made with a studio. The second one [2004] was made by Warner Independent, which was the art-house wing of a studio. The third film [2013] was made by a wonderful Greek man we met who financed the whole thing, and those three films show you what happened. It’s harder now, but obviously I’m still doing it. I still believe.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of “selling out” and what that means now.
I think about it constantly.
That’s the central tension of “Reality Bites.”
I mean, I almost didn’t do “Reality Bites” because I was worried it was selling out! I would be apoplectic whenever I was offered the cover of a magazine because some part of me thought success was just inherently uncool. But now, it’s like, if you don’t sell out, you’re never going to have an audience. And if you do sell out, you’re going to be owned, which leaves the artists no freaking avenue to thrive.
I remember when I had my theater company, we were broke and hustling to pay for this theater. All Smirnoff wanted was to host the party and give us 10 grand, which we desperately needed, but we had to put Smirnoff labels on everything and my friends all were like, “No way, we don’t do art to sell [expletive] vodka.” And now it’s like, “All right, George Clooney’s got a tequila.” Now there’s no shame about cash grabs.
It’s hard to imagine in 2026 that a fledgling theater company wouldn’t take the money.
They wouldn’t think twice. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. One of my big influences is Denzel, and when you watch a Denzel Washington performance, there’s no brands that float through your brain as you’re watching it. Whereas when I see a lot of young actors that do these brands, I look at their performance and as soon as there’s a close-up, it reminds me of the damned ad I saw at the Super Bowl. They don’t pay you for nothing, you know what I mean?
So I do think it’s a dilemma. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you how proud I was to be sitting here with you, talking about a Richard Linklater film that is consistent with the ethos that I carried as a young person. But at the same time, life has changed, right? And I want to try to not be stuck in the mud.
Do movies still feel as important to young people? Some can’t bear to go into a theater and not look at their phones. But to me, that break is like a spa day.
I’m really going to show my age but on the flight here, they had a classic-movies section and “Room With a View” was there. I’ve been walking around for the last five days in L.A. and you know where I really am? I’m in Florence, kissing Helena Bonham Carter. It’s such a perfectly made film, and it was such a break from my life.
That’s what we go for, and I think sometimes this [phone] gets you so adrenalized that you don’t realize you need a break, and the movies are a great break. But I do think time is on our side because people are going to figure that out.
You’ve still got faith in that?
This is ancient, right? Dionysius getting up there and singing and the crowd going nuts. I took my son to see “Godfather,” and we were blown away — it works, there’s nothing wrong there. I think Rick Linklater is turning a whole generation on to “Breathless” right now [with his film “Nouvelle Vague”] and it’s still sexy as hell, you still want to be those two people. So there’s some things that are still true, but there’s so much noise that we’re filtering through right now. I think we have to be a little forgiving of ourselves.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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