Ethan Hawke on Shedding Hair and Height to Play Lorenz Hart in ‘Blue Moon’
Ethan Hawke is getting raves and (very, very) early awards buzz for his performance in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, which had its world premiere in Berlin Tuesday night.
Hawke is unrecognizable as famed American musical-theater lyricist Lorenz, “Larry” Hart, the balding, diminutive creative partner to composer Richard Rodgers. The real-time feature follows Hart as he struggles with alcoholism and depression on the opening night of Oklahoma!, Rodgers’ Broadway triumph and his first musical with new lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Andrew Scott is Rodgers, Margaret Qualley is Elizabeth Weiland, Hart’s student “protégée.” Bobby Cannavale plays Hart’s bartender buddy, Eddie.
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But the film belongs to Hawke, who appears in every frame and gives one of his long career’s standout performances. His Hart alternates between charming raconteur and seedy has-been as he tries to reconcile with Rogers for a possible comeback. Even more unlikely is his attempt to woo Elizabeth, undeterred by the age difference (she is 20, he’s 47) and by the fact that Larry is gay.
Hawke says the physical transformation into the 5-foot, balding Hart, which involved shaving his head — a greasy comb-over barely covers his shiny pate — was “demolishing to my vanity” as was performing as the shortest man in the room.
“We did it with old stagecraft thing, to make me look shorter, but all day long, I was lower than I am in real life, doing scenes just staring up at Margaret Qualley,” says Hawke. “It’s very interesting how people treated you differently, particularly the way women treat you…Everybody giggles at you, they poke your ear, they pat your head and they don’t take you seriously. It was very really important for me to understanding Larry Hard and how he moved through the world.”
“He was kind of a beautiful wreck of a guy,” says Linklater, on Hart. “He had that genius, but then he’s a gay guy, at at time when your sexuality is against the law. He’s [5-foot] tall, he’s balding, he lives with his mom, [and] he’s a addict, which is probably the defining character that’s really screwing up his life. As alcohol is the great destroyer of art and lives.”
Blue Moon is Hawke and Linklater’s 9th film together, and their first since 2014’s Boyhood, in a long creative collaborative that has included the Before trilogy, Fast Food Nation and The Newton Boys.
“It feels like it’s been a 30-year conversation,” says Hawke. “I met him one night after he came to see a play I was in and we talked till 4 in the morning. That was 30 years ago. And we just keep talking and these movies come out of that.”
Linklater and Hawke famously spent 12 years shooting Boyhood, filming scenes every summer, starting in May 2022 through to August 2013.
It took almost as long to make Blue Moon. The idea originally came from writer Robert Kaplow, whose novel Me and Orson Welles Linklater adapted into a feature in 2008. Both Hawke and Linklater were interested in adapting his story about Lorenz Hart into a film but, according to Hawke, Linklater didn’t think he was old enough, back in 2010s to play the role.
“Rick [Linklater] would say: I need you got to have more lines in your face. I’m like: We’ll fake it. He said, No, we won’t fake anything. We’ll wait. He’s so patient. He could have just went and hired a different actor or whatever. But he didn’t. He just waited.”
Linklater’s version of the film’s origin tale is slightly different.
“[Hawke] will joke and say I wanted to wait until he looked so old no one would want to be with him,” the director quips,” but he so loved the character and was so excited about the challenge of playing him. We thought about it for 10 years.”
“Every couple years we [Hawke, Linklater and Kaplow] would take it out and do a reading, invite some friends over and read and talk about it,” says Hawke, and Robert would fix something and adjust something, and we talk about it some more. And a couple years ago and we read it again, and we think about it and talk about it, and Robert would change a few things. It just got a little better and a little better and a little better, until finally, last year, Rick was like, you think it’s time for Blue Moon? I was like: I thought it was time for 12 years! He’s like: I think it’s time now. And so we did it.”
Even for the multi-Oscar-nominated Hawke, playing Hart was a challenge. Aside from the physical alternations, Kaplow’s verbose script has the actor soliloquizing across large sections of the movie, delivering poetic tributes to love and beauty between snarky takedowns and wry analysis of the state of musical theater.
“It’s amazing, amazing dialog, and the lines are just delicious to say, but at the same time, is it challenging to have this very long, real-time performance,” says Hawke. “But Rick said he wanted the whole movie to feel like a Rogers and Hart song, that it should have the same bounce and rhythm changes and dynamics, be heartbreaking then funny and silly then smart and then strange. So I kind of thought of the whole thing like lyrics to a song.”
“There were points, during the filming when he said to me: I’m hitting the limit of my talent here, this is so demanding,” adds Linklater. “I was there to crack the whip and keep pushing. Our relationship is we push each other and everybody around us.”
“I find it so surprising that Linklater still wants to work with me,” says Hawke, half-jokingly. “He’s spent years of his life, editing my performances. He must be bored shitless looking at me. I feel so grateful that he’s remotely interested in still working with me. So I feel a great obligation to try to deliver.”
Hawke and Linklater plan to keep up their 30-year-plus conversation. They are already at work on what could become their 10th collaboration, a 19th-century historical piece that is still in the development stage. Maybe we’ll see it in Berlin 2035.
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