“Time is a better curator”: Ethan Hawke on relevance, reinvention and the new rules of engagement

The irony isn’t lost on Ethan Hawke. He’s getting the highest accolades of his career for playing an artist on the cusp of obsolescence. More than 40 years after he debuted on our screens as the space-obsessed 14-year-old dreamer in Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985), he has, for the first time, found himself in the running for his profession’s gold standard – the Oscar for Best Actor. 

But he’s reached this plateau by finding a new path. From his teenage years into middle age, he’s been growing older on screen playing prismatic versions of himself – the musing bohemian of 90s films Reality Bites (1994) and Before Sunrise (1995) maturing into a cool-dad era when, whether in genre movies or indie fare, you don’t doubt his characters’ record collections.

This was always the appeal of the Hawke project – seeing each stage of his life laid out before us on screen like an extended, real-time Boyhood (2014). But the fascinating paradox of his Oscar-nominated embrace of character acting in Blue Moon is that Hawke suddenly seems to be playing older – his Lorenz Hart is wrinkled and conceals his bald pate with a combover – even though the 55-year-old actor is actually playing younger. On the fateful night in 1943 when the action of this latest collaboration with Richard Linklater unfolds, Hart was only 48. He was also just five feet tall, which required Hawke to stand in out-of-shot trenches on set, so that he could look suitably dwarfed by Margaret Qualley, playing the object of his unrequited infatuation.

At the turn of the 1940s, Hart was riding high. He was prized for his cut-jewel lyrics, and his Broadway partnership with composer Richard Rodgers had endured for 20 years, birthing ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’, ‘Blue Moon’ and plenty more. But just as it was reaching new heights, the foundations collapsed. The urbane but self-destructive lyricist was drinking heavily, and when Hart’s toes curled at the idea of collaborating on a rural heartland musical, Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II instead. A new duo was forged who would put even Rodgers and Hart’s 1930s run in the shade. 

Like the song says, Blue Moon sees Hart standing alone, propping up the bar at a famous Broadway nightspot and contemplating the clamouring approval for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! on the night of its premiere. His wit is undiminished, but it’s now slaked with bitterness. He can feel the spotlight growing dimmer. With great pathos and the restless agitation of a wounded animal, Hawke captures Hart on a long night of the soul as the songwriter confronts the dawning possibility that his genius has had its moment.

Now it’s Hawke facing loud approval – and the most intense press tour of his life. But he sounds grounded about what it really means. Blue Moon’s warnings about talent and the value systems of the entertainment industry aren’t just show, and Hollywood’s Dow Jones index of stardom could teach Broadway a thing or two about volatility. 

When we speak over a video call, including reflecting on his tastes in films for an upcoming ‘At the Movies’ feature in Sight and Sound, Hawke is frank about the effort it takes these days to get an independent film like Blue Moon financed – even for trusted names like his and Linklater’s. Then there’s the challenge of getting word out about a movie that doesn’t fit into any ready marketing categories or algorithms. In embracing character acting, Hawke seems to have found a new momentum, but he talks like someone who knows he’ll have to keep adjusting course in an industry where most of the old assumptions are taking on water.

Sam Wigley: You first discussed the idea of you playing Lorenz Hart with Linklater more than a decade ago. Linklater wanted you to wait until you had a few more lines on your face, but was there anything more interior, more psychological that you felt you needed to wait for?

Ethan Hawke: To a fault, I get excited, and I would have done it whenever he said go. But, in hindsight, I learned so much in the last 10 years that was helpful. The lines in your face are one thing, but when I think back, he gave me this script to start thinking about right when we finished Boyhood and that marked the exact moment that I started getting more and more interested in character acting. 

I did [Chet Baker biopic] Born to Be Blue [2015], and that changed the ways that I was thinking about acting, and then I did this little film Maudie [2016], with Sally Hawkins, and Magnificent Seven [2016] – I just started exploring character acting. I was leaving what I had done previously – versions of myself – and started to expand the box. And that took me to John Brown [the abolitionist he played in the 2020 miniseries The Good Lord Bird] where I was playing around with hair and makeup and voice, and that combined with some of the stuff I was doing on stage. 

I don’t think I realised how much I was gonna learn in that decade. We all think we’re done learning, and then life happens and more trials and tribulations come. So, I’m really grateful we waited, not just for the lines on my face, but even just specifically for my relationship with this hair and makeup artist, David Atherton. I didn’t have any interest in that aspect of the profession as a young man. When I did the Scottish play [in 2013], I worked with a vocal coach that really changed how I think about voice and speech and movement. And doors opened in the way that I think about acting that were really exciting to me and all very, very useful for Blue Moon.

Once you were filming, Linklater told you he didn’t want to see ‘you’ in the film because he’s been looking at you for many years. Apart from the obvious physical transformation, what were the key things for you to get right in order for you to vanish and Lorenz Hart to emerge?

It’s what I call the deductive process in rehearsal: just be as simple as possible and get rid of anything – you know, my gestures. Every person draws confidence from a different well. And Rick was trying to figure out where Lorenz Hart’s confidence comes from and thought it was different than mine, and where his insecurities come from, and that they’re different from mine, and so it starts like a stripping away process.

When you have really excellent writing, you don’t get in the way of the writing, you can let the writing lead, and if it’s good, it’s like a guided meditation to take you into new terrain that hopefully happens, non-intellectually – it guides your heart, where it’s supposed to be, and ensures you’re not in the way, obscuring it.

People taught classes about this stuff: it’s whether you’re bringing the character to yourself or bringing your being to the character. In what I call third-person acting, you really have to try to bring yourself to the character. You can’t move the character to you.

One of the most emotionally harrowing aspects of Blue Moon is this idea that huge success and obsolescence can follow so closely upon each other. Just a few years before the events of the film, Hart was the toast of the town but now he’s old news and literally in the gutter dying.

You see that experience most often in athletics. I find it fascinating to watch very popular athletes’ retirement speeches because they’re kind of heartbreaking. It’s like they’re at their own funeral, and you watch the human psyche just break with that. This whole place that a human being draws their identity from, they have to say goodbye to. And a lot of them don’t know what they’re gonna do next. 

I’ve made this joke before, but I thought about it a lot on Blue Moon: it was like Lorenz Hart is the equivalent of the greatest mandolin player in the history of the world two days after Elvis broke and now nobody gives a shit about the mandolin. You dedicate your life to the mandolin and all of a sudden the mandolin’s passé. It doesn’t matter how good you are at it, nobody cares about it. I think we’re all worried about being rendered irrelevant, where the party just moves on without you – that’s a feeling all of us understand.

From Explorers and Dead Poets Society (1989) via Reality Bites and Before Sunrise, you’re an actor who – in a very Linklater-y way – we’ve followed through many different stages of life. How does it affect your understanding of your life to be able to go back and see yourself growing up on screen like that?

I don’t know – ask me in a couple of months. You know, I haven’t ever done as much press as I’ve done in the last three months. It makes you kind of see yourself in third person. It’s a little bit like looking at your reflection. You don’t wanna do it too long because it’s not helpful. It’s helpful to make sure you don’t have something on your face or your hair is not ridiculous or something, but it’s not really helpful. On one level, I’m just so grateful that I’ve gotten to follow this passion this long, and it’s still so interesting to me, and that I still have opportunities to do it. I’ve really enjoyed it and I feel that I’ve learned.

I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson give interviews and he always talks about how every scientific breakthrough just brings more questions. Every time he learns something, it opens this door to… wait, actually, there’s more things I didn’t understand than I thought. That’s kind of how I feel about my profession.

It’s getting more and more interesting to me, and so my overwhelming feeling is, well, I get interested in what’s next, because I certainly wouldn’t have predicted 10 years ago that I would be exactly where I am right now. So I’m interested what the next decade will bring.

Also, put simply, the industry is changing right under our feet. As soon as you develop and change, and start to feel like you know what you’re doing, the rules of engagement have completely changed. How to sell an independent film is just different than it was in the 90s, and because I came up in the 90s, I still think it is like that. That was how I learned the rules of the game, and now I have to pay attention about how the rules are changing. People who are good at business are better at seeing that. I don’t really think like a businessman, and so I’m a little late to notice those changes. That’s part of why I love the theatre: the theatre is an older profession and, you do a good production of a play, people come see it. It’s pretty simple. It doesn’t need to be figured out how to be streamed or whether it should be a limited series or a feature film.

I read you telling the LA Times it’s a lot more difficult to penetrate the zeitgeist with a film these days, but a lot of the charm of Blue Moon is how unzeitgeisty and anachronistic it is. Despite the challenges of it being an independent film, it trusts its audience to work out why it’s relevant in 2025, 2026.

That’s why I’m so grateful for Linklater. He assumes an an intelligence on the part of the audience that a lot of directors don’t assume, and the audience matches him. If you don’t have a lot of money for advertising and things, then there’s a lot of pressure put on the actor to go try to rumble up a lot of noise and attention. That didn’t used to be true. Hell, when I was growing up, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, they wouldn’t even do any interviews. I wish I could do that. The film speaks for itself, you know. But if I do that, nobody will know the movie came out. 

With my movies like First Reformed [2017] or Blue Moon, I think I’ve spent more hours promoting them than I did acting in them – which I wouldn’t have believed in 1995. Like, what are you talking about? I think I did four interviews for Before Sunrise. I’m not complaining because, like you said, it’s tough to get a movie like Blue Moon that doesn’t fit in [out there]; there is no algorithm for it. So if I want to make work like this, I’ve got to figure out a way to see if anyone cares.

There’s all this heat around the film and now you’re nominated for the Oscar. Does all that recognition affect your own perception of the performance?

No. I’m a naturally suspicious person. Those kind of criteria for quality are very useful. For the audiences – like, all right, hey, there’s a consensus, everybody thinks this is good and worth your time. I remember when I was younger, that’s how I would decide what movies to see. I would see all the movies nominated for Best Picture or, oh wow, that person was nominated for a performance, I should see that. 

But if you use it as a litmus test for quality… time is just a much better curator. There’s so many films that are ignored in any given year. I was just talking with some friends about the sustained excellence of Wes Anderson and how he’s not winning. I think when history reflects back on what important films are coming out in these years, he’ll be on everybody’s list, but he’s not going to the Oscars this year. The world has to come up with ways to celebrate art and curate it and try to get people out, but as the artist in yourself, you can’t let it be the guide. 

I went to see a friend’s play last night, and I was saying to him, I know I loved it, and he wanted to know, well, do you think it’s going to get good reviews? Are we going to run a long time? I was like, I have no idea. Sometimes I just love things that nobody cares about. Sometimes I can’t stand the thing that everybody cares about. It’s mysterious to me how the world decides what’s great and what’s not. 

I feel really grateful for it and happy about it because I know it increases the chances that Rick and I will get to make another movie together, and that we can keep doing things that are a little bit left of centre. You gotta pay to play in this life, and if you don’t make anybody any money, you don’t get to play. Those are just the realities of it, but when I think about my favourite performances in my lifetime I have no idea if they won an award for it or not.

Blue Moon is such a rich film about these very value judgments – what’s here to stay and what’s not.

That’s a great point. I love there’s a line I have in Blue Moon about how I know that the show is gonna win the damn Pulitzer and it’s gonna play in high schools forever, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. It might mean the exact opposite.

Blue Moon is available now to buy or rent at home. At the Movies with Ethan Hawke will appear in the April 2026 issue of Sight and Sound.