H is for Hawke
The Good Lord Bird represents radical transformation for its star
Spittle flies. Ethan Hawke’s eyes are a cloudy blue, his teeth crooked, his beard prophetically long. He is shouting Old Testament scripture in a quavering whiskey growl and pop-quizzing his sons about Bible verses in the thick of a gunfight.
Hawke is John Brown, the violent antislavery crusader who collaborated with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, famously raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., and stoked the Civil War. Playing America’s abolitionist vigilante in the Showtime limited series The Good Lord Bird is the role of a lifetime for him — a “giant, greasy, fat, rich turkey leg on Thanksgiving morning,” Hawke says. He co-created the show with James Mcbride, and co- wrote all seven episodes.
Hawke couldn’t stop laughing when he read Mcbride’s 2013 novel, which tells Brown’s story with some dramatic licence and Coen brothers-style black humour, and felt called to evangelize it — not least because Americans know next to nothing about Brown.
“... ‘ He was a lunatic, right?’ It’s interesting society thinks a person that took up arms to stop four million people from being bought and sold and treated as horribly as African Americans, the criminal way in which they were treated — a person who tries to take up arms to stop that is not insane. It’s the society that’s insane.”
Brown is one of the most radical transformations in the actor’s career, which began 35 years ago. In July 1985, Hawke starred in Explorers as a teen named Ben who travels into space and meets a family of aliens. Joe Dante gave this 13- year- old from Texas his first screen role because “he was very endearing, he was very awkward,” Dante says. “He was tripping over the wires, and he was really cute.”
Explorers opened on the same day as the Live Aid benefit concert. It tanked. Hawke went back to school, feeling like “the ship had left the station without me, that my dreams were never going to come true, because clearly I’d had the opportunity and I’d blown it.”
Hawke told Dante years later he felt personally responsible for the film’s commercial failure “and that he carried this burden around with him all the time, of it being on his shoulders that the picture didn’t work,” Dante says. In reality, Dante was pressured to release an unfinished cut of the movie. “I disabused him of this notion,” he says. “I mean, I couldn’t have been happier with him.”
There’s something of Ben in many of Hawke’s characters through the years — even John Brown — in that he is a true believer who comes face to face with crushing disappointment. Think of his second major role, as the painfully shy Todd in Dead Poets Society, who comes out of his shell only to lose his roommate and his inspiring teacher. Or the rookie cop in Training Day, whose idealism is quickly splattered with blood.
Explorers is about something secretly profound, Hawke says, and “it’s a metaphor, I think, for how all of us think. ‘ Oh, if I can win the championship, if I could take over my dad’s business, if I could be a famous actor, my life will be fully realized.’ And invariably, whenever we pass one of these milestones — turning 50, turning 21, whatever it is — there’s this sense of disappointment of: is that all there is?”
“And yet I find it really beautiful,” says the actor, who turns 50 in November. “I do think that has been the story of my life, and I’m probably drawn to stories like that.”
Hawke grew up in a “kaleidoscope” of Christianity; his Episcopalian parents divorced and married Christians in different denominations. What was confusing to him as a kid led to an ecumenical curiosity that he now appreciates. It also makes the country’s Evangelical marriage to President Donald Trump infuriating to him.
“I was raised by really serious Christian people, and I’ve always just been so disappointed in the leadership that we’ve seen,” Hawke says. “You sometimes wonder with these people’s politics if they’ve ever read the Sermon on the Mount, you know. John Brown was a nonviolent abolitionist for the first 51 years of his life, and what he came to believe is that, if you can read to people the Sermon on the Mount and they still will behave the way they are, then they have to be punched in the nose.”
In The Good Lord Bird, Brown talks about his decision to shed blood for his African- American brothers and sisters: “Do you think it’s a crime for a citizen to stand up and say, ‘Each and every one of us is imbued by our creator with certain inalienable rights? If that’s a crime, then the Declaration of Independence is a call for sedition and should be burned.”
The series rings with eerie overtones of this year’s Black Lives Matter movement. Hawke notes how the Confederate statues he drove past in Virginia every day while filming are now covered in graffiti, or destroyed.
“I think people have a real hunger and an appetite for exploring why we’re born, and why we die, and what our role is to live here together,” Hawke says. “But we don’t really see it reflected in our storytelling very much. No sooner do you mention the word ‘ God’ than a lot of people skitter away from the dinner table, you know. I guess they’re scared they’re going to be preached to, or they’re scared they’re going to be told they’re wrong. But it’s such a valuable conversation to have.”