Ethan Hawke on Biopics, Chet Baker, and Breaking Out
When Ethan Hawke turned 40 a few years ago, he did a couple of things. “One is I got my motorcycle license,” Hawke says, splayed out in the corner booth of a Manhattan cafe. “I had it before, but I got it again. But when I went to buy a bike, the guy said, ‘You have four kids? I’d wait till the youngest graduates from high school.’ And I thought, ‘You know what? That’s a really good idea.'”
The other thing Hawke did was start working a lot. “I basically pressed the panic button,” he says. “When I was young and everybody wanted me to be a movie star, I was like, ‘Eh, we’ll see.’ But all of a sudden I turned 40, and I just wanted to work. Put me in, coach. I want to play.” Partly this was a days-are-numbered kind of thing, but it was also practical: Hawke has two teenagers with his ex-wife, Uma Thurman (Maya, 17, and Levon, 14), and two more daughters with his current wife, Ryan (seven-year-old Clementine and four-year-old Indiana). “All of a sudden you’re staring at a divorce, and child support, and college coming up, and you’ve got new babies and you’ve kind of burned through the savings …” he says, trailing off. “It creates a loud noise in your head: ‘Is everybody OK?'”
It’s a wet late-winter afternoon, and Hawke is dressed for the weather in a wool cap, red flannel shirt and beat-up work boots. With his grungy style and omnipresent goatee, even at 45, he looks a lot like the fresh-faced college dropout who, a quarter-century ago, landed a series of roles that would go on to define a generation: the sensitive prep-schooler in Dead Poets Society, the slacker guitarist in Reality Bites, the philosophizing backpacker in Before Sunrise. Recently, however, in films like Boyhood (directed by his close pal and frequent collaborator Richard Linklater), as well as his newest movie – a bio-pic of Fifties jazz musician Chet Baker called Born to Be Blue – the onetime Gen X poster boy has morphed into a bona fide grown-up. And to hear him tell it, he’s so much better for it.
In some ways, Born to Be Blue started 15 years ago, when Brad Pitt dropped out of a movie about Baker – the broodingly handsome trumpeter whose once-promising career was derailed by heroin. Hawke and Linklater took over with plans to make a kind of anti-biopic – just one day in Baker’s life, where he neither does drugs nor plays music. “Most biopics fall into the category of ‘let’s watch so-and-so act,’ ” Hawke says. “Everybody loves it, and you get lots of prizes. But there’s something showy about it.” The movie he and Linklater planned was different – but they had trouble getting it funded, and eventually Hawke got too old for the part.
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