Ethan Hawke: ‘I could hear every nasty word the audience said about me…’

When did Ethan Hawke receive the most wounding criticism of his career? His teenage heart-throb days? Those mid-career forays into horror? Not quite.

In 2005, Hawke was appearing in a play in an intimate off-Broadway theatre: “Or at least intimate enough that I could hear every word the audience said,” he recalls, in a melodiously husky Texan drawl. The director had come up with a bold opening: as the crowd took their seats, Hawke would already be lying on stage, his character passed out drunk, only to wake after the house lights dimmed.

At the time, Hawke was going through a painful divorce from the actress Uma Thurman, the possible causes of which had become a tabloid talking point. “And when the crowd saw me lying there, they’d just talk openly about me – and, I’m not kidding, at three performances out of eight, the talk would be nasty,” he cringes. “Things like: ‘He was a real s--- to her.’ ‘Did you hear he did this?’ And even: ‘Wasn’t he terrible in that movie?’

“I just had to breathe deep and remind myself that these were the people I wanted to play for,” he shrugs. “You gotta love thy neighbour, but you don’t get to pick ’em.”

It’s a crisp spring morning in a London hotel. Hawke, 51, sips his coffee, folds his arms, and stretches his legs so far off the sofa that his body resembles a ferry’s loading ramp. “And in some strange way,” he chuckles, “it was a nice fire to walk through.”

Hawke is not the type to shy from the paths that could leave your extremities singed. As a Generation X pin-up in the early 1990s, he spurned blockbusters to slip off to Vienna with Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy, and make Before -Sunrise on a shoestring. A decade later, he spent the movie-star -capital earned from his Oscar--nominated performance in 2001’s Training Day on writing his first novel and playing Hotspur in Henry IV. And now, in the wake of two of his richest, most raved-about roles – a stricken, alcoholic Protestant minister in First Reformed, and a firebrand abolitionist in The Good Lord Bird – he’s gone to Marvel.

Yes, that Marvel. After 36 -franchise-free years, Hawke is playing the villain in the superhero serial Moon Knight, which begins on -Disney+ next week. His character, the icy cult leader Arthur -Harrow, is the enemy of Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant, a hapless museum gift shop employee who is also the earthly avatar of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu.

It’s a freestanding Marvel oddity, which for Hawke was a huge part of its charm. “I didn’t have to figure out, like, what my relationship to Thor was,” he says.

Recruiting him had been Isaac’s idea. Hawke lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Ryan, and their two daughters; Hawke also has two children from his marriage to Thurman, the eldest of whom is the 23-year-old actress Maya Hawke. Isaac lives nearby with his wife and two sons, and towards the end of 2020 the two had bumped into one another in a coffee shop queue.

“This guy in a face mask told me how much he’d enjoyed The Good Lord Bird,” Hawke recalls. “Then he pulled it down and said ‘It’s me. Will you be the baddie in my Marvel thing?’ And I was like, ‘Is this guy being serious?’ ”

Hawke had just returned from Ireland, where he’d been filming The Northman, Robert Eggers’s forthcoming Viking vengeance epic. That experience – all mud and mayhem, and brooding allusions to Hamlet – was, he raves, “right in my wheelhouse”. But Marvel was new: lots of green screen and elaborate sets. He likens the job to being a kitchen assistant in a thronging restaurant: “Marvel buys the groceries and sets the table, but as long as you’re making the kind of food its customers will keep coming back for, they’ll let you cook whatever you like.”

However laidback he may be in person, Hawke clearly thrives on the grind. When Hollywood downed tools in 2020, he finished his fourth novel, the frisky and unflinching A Bright Ray of Darkness, about an actor whose marriage is in the process of collapse. Yes, it was inspired by his own experiences, and yes, it features a scene in which the lead character, while on stage, overhears audience members tutting about his personal life.

He also helped devise a Zoom-based production of Waiting for Godot, in which he starred opposite John Leguizamo. And made a film in Rome with Abel Ferrara. Oh – and directed a shrewd and sweeping six-part documentary titled The Last Movie Stars, about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and the ways in which cinema shifted during the star couple’s long-lived careers. That project, which will be broadcast later this year, is based on transcripts of reminiscences Newman had once recorded with industry friends, and intended at one point to rework into a memoir. The original recordings were lost, so Hawke decided to dramatise them like radio plays: George Clooney voices Newman and Laura Linney Woodward, while Sam Rockwell, Zoe Kazan, Vincent D’Onofrio and others take on supporting roles.

He thought of Clooney for Newman because “there’s a kind of symmetry. With that level of stardom comes a very specific kind of responsibility: we saw Newman wield it, and Clooney also takes it very seriously.”

Did he ever want it for himself? “Do I wish that Before Sunrise had made $100 million, and then I could do whatever I wanted? You want the artistic freedom it can bring. But it’s also a cage that I don’t know if I would have been able to handle. It can be very hard to grow when people think they know exactly who you are.”

Hawke’s carefully staked-out -position on the fringe of mainstream success gives his talk an onlooker’s candour, and this was never more evident than five years ago, when he was one of the few major actors to openly admit he had been aware of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual misconduct. One of Weinstein’s accusers was Hawke’s ex-wife Thurman, who claimed the producer had attacked her in a London hotel room during the Pulp Fiction promotional tour; Weinstein, who is currently serving a 23-year sentence for rape and sexual assault, has denied this.

Did Hawke feel powerless to speak out at the time? He stops to reflect. “Not powerless. We’re often greedy, and subjugate our best selves. Sometimes, frankly, you have to.” He recalls trying to drum up funds for a project with -Linklater, and suggesting to his long-time friend that they ask Weinstein for help: Linklater told him he’d rather the film went unmade, and it did.

“That’s why I don’t judge anybody for what happened to them,” he says. “When I hear somebody say ‘How could those agents send those young women into a meeting in a hotel room?’, my answer is ‘Try stopping them.’ You’re treating these young women as if they were already victims. But they were the best actresses of their generation, and they knew that if you wanted to get a movie made, you had to talk to [Weinstein] at that point. And for those who had the courage to think ‘I can handle this guy’, he was making dreams come true.”

Hawke and Linklater have made six films together: three of them were the Before trilogy, a series of snapshots from the lives of a couple, Celine and Jesse, over 18 years; and one was Boyhood, a seemingly impossible project shot over 11 years at a rate of about 15 minutes per annum, about the childhood and adolescence of a Texas lad. (Hawke played the boy’s father.)

Hawke imagined the latter as an experimental work that might be screened in art museums, if they were lucky: instead, it was nominated for six Oscars, took Best Film at the Baftas, and made almost ￡45 million worldwide.

The customary nine years have now elapsed since the last instalment of the Before films. Have he, Delpy and Linklater talked about making a fourth? He reveals the three swapped some emails about a possible lockdown instalment, with Celine and Jesse in quarantine, “which would have been funny. But I think, for all of us, the Before films are over. There’s something about the way the first opens on a couple in their 40s fighting on the train, and then the third one ends with Celine and Jesse having effectively become that couple, that to me feels complete.”

Revisiting the characters, he says, would require “changing the architecture. We had an idea that it would maybe be cool to make nine short films in secret, one per year, and release them together. Or perhaps go back in 30 years, when only one of them’s around. But it would have to be something all three of us agreed on.”

And presumably have the backing to do so. “If you want to make movies with the Richard Linklaters of this world, you also have to be in movies millions of people see. That’s what keeps the actor’s life interesting,” he grins. “You gotta pay to play.”

Moon Knight airs weekly on Disney+ from Wednesday