Ethan Hawke and Sally Hawkins star in “Maudie.”
Among the class of actors who have reached the heights of fame, Ethan Hawke stands separate in many ways.
Beginning as a child actor in 1985’s “The Explorers,” Hawke’s big break came at 18 when he starred alongside Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.” He has since maintained a decades-long career, unusually as both a household-name film actor (via his young Gen X heartthrob status from “Reality Bites” or his Oscarnominated turn alongside Denzel Washington in the gritty cop flick “Training Day”) and as a quietly prolific artist — a theater company founder, novelist, screenwriter, director and star of small, acclaimed films.
His latest film, “Maudie,” opening Friday, June 23, observes the Canadian artist Maudie Lewis (Sally Hawkins) and her relationship with a local fish peddler, Everett Lewis (Hawke).
But Hawke is eager to talk art and life in general on a Saturday morning in a SoMa hotel room. When he speaks, his answers are patient, thoughtful, engaged. “I like people, and I like talking,” Hawke says simply. It’s no surprise that he co-wrote two of director (and frequent collaborator) Richard Linklater’s three “Before” films — a chatty masterpiece of a trilogy that traces Hawke and co-star Julie Delpy’s romance over the years almost exclusively through conversations about life and love.
Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, but moved around constantly as a child. He was quickly in and out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he studied acting briefly before “Dead Poets Society” came knocking.
“It’s strange to wake up and realize I’ve been doing this for over 30 years,” Hawke says. “It’s a little shocking to me. I feel like I’m part of the William Holden school of acting. One in 10 will be good, 1 in 100 will get you an Academy Award.”
Hawke, for his part, has Oscar nominations in acting (“Training Day,” “Boyhood”) and screenwriting (“Before Sunrise,” “Before Midnight”), along with a Tony Award nomination. His three novels also have been critically praised, and he’s directed a handful of films. One of these films, the documentary, “Seymour: An Introduction,” followed a former concert pianist who seemed to be a source of answers for Hawke’s own search for meaning in his eclectically artistic life.
The varied success that has sprung from Hawke’s earnest artistic curiosity feels mismatched to the typical trajectory of a onetime child actor. But his career, he says, is grounded because of that fact.
“There’s a great expression: ‘To be the master of one craft, you have to be an apprentice to five,’ ” Hawke says. “It wasn’t until ‘The Hottest State’ (Hawke’s first novel) came out that I fundamentally understood how much other people viewed each of these forms as different. When I was doing ‘Dead Poets Society,’ it was a whole movie about the arts.”
In looking back, Hawke often refers to his early learning environments like the set of “Dead Poets Society.” A staggering introductory course to filmmaking, it provided both the kinship of fellow young actors learning in the spotlight and the wisdom of veterans via director Peter Weir (“Picnic at Hanging Rock,” “The Truman Show”) and Williams.
His first real challenge in acting, Hawke says, was perhaps the film’s most memorable scene, when Hawke and Williams have a profound one-on-one that results in a fury of improvised poetry and a famed “barbaric yawp.”
“Every now and then you have a day that — your life orients around a day,” Hawke says. “You read about it in books or something where you meet somebody or something happens, and it creates vibrations or dominoes start to fall based off this day. And that was the day for me.”
Ethan Hawke credits his own stability in the spotlight to having the right people around him. One of those was Richard Linklater, whose sterling filmography is inextricably attached to Hawke’s many leading performances.
Yet after the awardwinning triumphs of “Dead Poets,” Hawke was wary. “I was extremely ambitious, really,” he says. “I wanted a different thing than most people wanted. I didn’t want to just be a famous actor. I wanted to be in this profession forever. I wanted to contribute. And I didn’t know how to do it, and I was worried that too much success would be hurtful to my learning process.”
“River’s death had a lot to with that,” Hawke adds, referring to the late River Phoenix, who began his film career in “The Explorers” alongside Hawke. “I watched how hard that was. It’s hard to get what you want before you really know yourself. It’s confusing.” Phoenix, who also would have been 46, died of a drug overdose in 1993 at 23.
Hawke credits his own stability in the spotlight to having the right people around him. Professionally and creatively, one of those was Linklater, whose sterling filmography is inextricably attached to Hawke’s many leading performances. The partnership, which Hawke likens to one of the “mysteries of life,” has yielded such cinematically prodigious works as the 12-year film process of 2013’s “Boyhood.”
Hawke has still had his fair share of mainstream, bigger-budget roles — last year he reunited with Washington (his “favorite actor”) for the star-studded remake of “The Magnificent Seven.” But, he notes, “I’ve been fortunate in that whenever I try to be successful I fall on my ass.”
Hawke laughs agreeably at Linklater’s supposed distinction of the “Before” films as “the lowest-grossing trilogy of all time.” It is a fitting encapsulation of his unusual career — a seasoned star who commands a franchise, if only one seen by few looking for patient, enriching cinema.
Indeed, Hawke’s reputation is built on the meaningful, if modest, along with the challenging — his upcoming “Maudie” looks frankly at a decades-long relationship with its often ugly blemishes.
Yet for his prolific body of work, Hawke sees his best work only ahead of him.
“You can’t do this job from the age of 13 to 46 and do it seriously, and not have it keep changing,” Hawke says. “Life changes. Everything is always changing. So why wouldn’t it in your profession? And as it deepens, it oddly gets more mysterious. I remember being a kid, and you think, well, isn’t life going to get boring?”
“Well, it doesn’t really get boring. And loving movies doesn’t get boring if you really love it. It just gets more interesting if you look at it more deeply.”