Ethan Hawke has too many other interests, whether it’s working on the New York stage or helping raise his four children, to overly worry about the details of a successful movie career now three decades old, but recently he had an epiphany about his standing. More than ever, people were recognising him on the street.
“I’ve been thinking about it and it’s because when I was younger and Reality Bites came out, only young people recognised me. Now I’ve made so many different movies that older people have seen some,” Hawke says. “Now there’s a certain crowd that loves Before Midnight, a certain crowd that loves The Purge, a certain crowd that love Gattaca.”
The 43-year-old actor, with the familiar facial hair and wry, contemplative air, may have chosen the Boerum Hill neighbourhood in Brooklyn over life in Los Angeles, but he has become one of Hollywood’s most dependable stars, making movies that are sometimes memorable and sometimes successful (and occasionally both) for each of those distinct crowds.
He’s as likely to be in an art-house drama like last year’s acclaimed Before Midnight, for which he earnt his third Academy Award nomination as one of the co-writers, as a low-budget pulp thriller or horror film, such as 2012’s Sinister. The reason, as Hawke modestly sees it, is that he doesn’t disappear into his roles like the true greats do.
“There are certain types of actors that can shape change themselves, people like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daniel Day-Lewis,” he says. “I’ve never really been the kind of performer who can do that, so one of the ways I challenge myself to be better is to be in different kinds of movies.”
That approach has never been in sharper focus than in the coming weeks, when Hawke memorably stars in two distinct yet impressive movies that release on successive Thursdays. The knotty science-fiction storytelling of Predestination, written and directed by Australian filmmakers the Spierig Brothers and shot in Melbourne, will be followed by the coming-of-age saga Boyhood, a study of time’s passage and life’s changes from Hawke’s good friend and Before Midnight director, Richard Linklater.
“He’s a great guy,” says Michael Spierig, who on stage read out a gracious email from Hawke apologising for his absence when Predestination opened the Melbourne International Film Festival on July 31. Michael and his sibling Peter got to know Hawke when he came to Queensland to shoot their second feature, the 2009 vampire-tale twist Daybreakers, and when they sent him Predestination, their adaptation of a 1959 Robert A. Heinlein short story where Hawke plays a time-travelling policeman, he replied within 24 hours, telling them he was in.
Hawke’s commitment matters, especially on independent film projects. With his name attached, Predestination was announced several years ago at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was sold to various international distributors with the proceeds funding production.
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“Some actors just come on set, read the lines, and off they go. Ethan gets involved,”
