Desperately seeking Ethan

Ethan Hawke has spent his career cast as the perpetual slacker student. Now, at 38 and part of Sam Mendes's latest theatrical outing, does he finally feel grown up? Laura Barton finds out.

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Laura Barton The Guardian, Saturday 16 May 2009

'We just celebrate mediocrity' ... Ethan Hawke. Photograph: Gregori Civera There is a moment in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in which Liubov, the deluded mistress of the play's doomed country estate, tackles Trofimov, the perpetual student, about his attitude to affairs of the heart. Trofimov has declared himself to be above the foolishness of falling in love. Liubov counters that, at the advanced age of 26, this is a rather priggish attitude to life. "You're not pure!" she declares, her tone somewhere between despair and derision. "You're just late!" 1. 2. 3. 4. The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale The Old Vic, London SE1

1. Starts 23 May 2. Until 15 August 3. oldvictheatre.com I am thinking of this line just as Ethan Hawke comes walking through the hotel bar. He wades through the piped music and the cigarette smoke and the heavy, floral scent of the candles, with hand outstretched. "Are you waiting for me?" he asks, wide-eyed, yet sleepy-voiced. Hawke, currently playing Trofimov in Sam Mendes's touring production, has made a career out of portraying a certain youthful purity. It's a quality that has characterised many of his defining roles: in Dead Poets Society, as new boy Todd, it was there in his pale, untrammelled face. In Reality Bites, he was Troy, the smartarse slacker graduate, too scared either to compromise his dreams or to admit his love for Winona Ryder; in Training Day he played the well-scrubbed rookie cop to Denzel Washington's corrupt narcotics officer; and then, in Before Sunrise and its sequel, Before Sunset, he was the restless, open-hearted American travelling through Europe and enjoying a brief encounter with Frenchwoman Julie Delpy. It is a quality that has also been apparent in Hawke's life outside acting; he has tackled a variety of art forms with youthful gusto, publishing two novels, The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday, directing an art-house movie, Chelsea Walls, and a play, Things We Want. He has also been married twice, the first time to actor Uma Thurman, with whom he has two children, the second to their former nanny, Ryan Shawhughes, with whom he has a daughter, one-year-old Clementine. Yet while in a certain light Hawke's might appear a diverse, multidisciplinary career, in another it might seem the behaviour of a man who has never quite settled to anything. Now that he's reached the grand old age of 38, but still finds himself playing the role of a perpetual student, one might reasonably wonder if Hawke isn't actually pure at all; maybe he really is just late. He was talked into taking the part of Trofimov by Mendes himself, who lives "a couple of streets down" in New York. "He asked me to meet him at the Empire Diner," Hawke says, "and he told me about the plan." The "plan" is a grand transatlantic enterprise, the Bridge Project, which unites the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic and Neal Street Productions, and for the next three years will be a kind of touring theatre company, staging two plays at a time. This inaugural year sees not only the production of Tom Stoppard's new translation of The Cherry Orchard, but also Mendes's take on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. As well as Hawke, the cast includes Simon Russell Beale, Sinad Cusack, Richard Easton and Rebecca Hall; having begun in Brooklyn in January, they'll conclude the tour at the Old Vic in London, starting this month. In truth, when Mendes spoke to him, Hawke had already heard about the project from Easton. "I remember thinking, 'Oh God, I hope they don't approach me!' Because I knew if they did, I would do it. And it wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing with the year." Why not? "You know," he smiles, "there's a financial crisis, people would say it's the wrong time to drop out and do theatre for a year. But mostly because I knew I wouldn't be able to say no." His stage debut had been in The Seagull, in which he had, naturally, played the aspiring playwright Konstantin Treplev. "And I'd fallen in love with Chekhov then. I'd fallen in

love with the whole idea of trying to put humanity on stage. But at the end of that experience, in my 21-year-old brain I kind of decided that it was undoable; that what Chekhov and Stanislavski were after was a noble attempt, but I just didn't think it was possible, because the plays just continually seem to not please the audience." He continued in this belief for 10 years, until he saw Russell Beale in Mendes's production of Uncle Vanya - he speaks of it with awe. So when Mendes approached him about this latest project, "it seemed like this would be the right way to do it. And, you know, mixing it up with a Shakespeare comedy seemed ... cool." In The Winter's Tale Hawke plays Autolycus, the jovial con man of Bohemia. He plays the role as a kind of Bob Dylanesque troubadour, roaming the stage with a guitar, reinventing himself from one moment to the next. "It was Sam's idea, and a good one, that Bohemia's got this American vibe. And I'm really into that whole Woody Guthrie thing..." Autolycus is really a strange misfit, which Hawke says he uses to his advantage: "You can do whatever you want with it. He doesn't fit in the play." He gives a brief, flat chuckle. "Shakespeare's bizarre - you could remove Autolycus from the plot and it wouldn't affect the story at all!" Does he feel the two plays correspond in any particular way? "I've heard Sam talk about it," he says speculatively, as if chewing a toothpick. "I don't know. It's hard. I remember when I first read [The Cherry Orchard] for this project, I was bowled over by it. And now I'm so intimate with it that I can't even really speak about it." He swills the ice cubes in his glass. "Some days I hate it. And some days I like it." Today he does not seem especially fond of it. "I did this project to work on The Cherry Orchard, and my experience has been that I've fallen in love with Shakespeare again. To be honest, nobody's asked me to do comedy before, so to do comedy and music in Shakespeare, that's been really rewarding for me." Quite why no one has asked him to do comedy he is uncertain. "Maybe coz I'm not funny," he deadpans. "But mainly I think it's because people have an idea of what you do. And then that's just what you keep doing until ..." He trails off. I tell him that his portrayal of Trofimov reminds me of Troy in Reality Bites. "Yes, me, too," he says, and laughs wheezily. "I think that's why Sam wanted to cast me. In some weird, subconscious way, my baggage as an actor fits right into that part. The eternal student, all that stuff, the negative and positive aspects of Trofimov, are easily attributed to the negative and positive aspects of people's perception of me. And that's not lost on Sam." The line between character and actor is sometimes blurred for Hawke, too. "It's very easy to internalise the character and like him, only to play it and come to realise the audience doesn't like him, and then it comes to feel the audience doesn't like you." He frowns. "Trofimov operates outside, floats around the orchard, and in a way he's a pretentious bastard, but in another way he's the only one with some real beliefs and the only one willing to speak on them and live his life by them." For a moment, you sense that Hawke could be talking about his own life as an actor. Today, he certainly looks the part of the eternal student. He is wearing a grey zip-up tracksuit top, a pair of raggedy jeans and a grey tweed flat cap. At one point he takes off

the cap and reveals hair that is slept-in and greasy-looking. But the most noticeable thing about his appearance is his teeth: unwhitened, a little gnarled, indeed a bit Britishlooking; they are defiantly anti-Hollywood. His failure to conquer Hollywood in any bold, convincing fashion has perplexed many; for a while, certainly after Reality Bites, it seemed as if he might be the defining actor of the age: the smart, sensitive face of Generation X. Perhaps the problem was that he always seemed somewhat unconvinced by the Hollywood thing. Born in Texas and raised by his mother in New Jersey, Hawke enjoyed early success as a teen actor (his first feature role was at the age of 14, opposite River Phoenix in the 1985 film Explorers), but twice dropped out of acting to go to university. For much of his career, he has made a habit of choosing offbeat projects and theatre roles, rather than box-office hits. "One of the most difficult aspects of being an actor is trying to find the right work," he says wearily. "Work that speaks to an audience, that you enjoy doing and that is reflective of your artistic sensibility." He fiddles with a bowl of rice crackers. "To be a contemporary movie actor, you have to kill people - that's basically it. If you don't cock'n'load'n'fire a Smith & Wesson at some point in your film career, you're not going to have a film career." He laughs rather hollowly and eats a cracker with what I think stands for noisy defiance. "There just aren't enough movies that I like to keep me working in movies all the time. Well, let me rephrase that: there aren't enough available parts." His other lines of work - theatre, directing, writing - "keep me interested and excited and curious and working, without having to do every schlock movie I get offered." He has some interesting projects due for release: a small appearance in an ensemble film, New York I Love You, a vampire flick, Daybreakers, and Brooklyn's Finest, which reunites him with Antoine Fuqua, the director of Training Day, and which he describes as "the best movie I've made in a long time". "I struggle with people thinking all these superhero movies are such great films," he sighs. "We just celebrate mediocrity. We run it up the flagpole. There's always going to be a market for superhero movies, and I don't want to criticise it - I'll do a superhero movie if I have to - but it's the James Joyces of the world who need to be run up the flagpole. But nobody's reading them, because it's difficult." The proudest work of his career seems to be Before Sunrise and its sequel, directed by Richard Linklater. When the film was released in 1995, it was unorthodox in its simple, dialogue-heavy structure, essentially just one long, inconclusive conversation between two characters. It was also thoroughly charming. "The thing that's really unique about Richard Linklater is he can take an idea that everyone had - basically every slacker student film-maker had that idea of 'I just wanna go from one person to the next ... you know, have no narrative, no plot ...' But it's very difficult to do and to actually have something to say." He lights up as he talks. "I remember on Before Sunrise, Rick used to talk about how the target is so small. It's a very simple idea: what it's like to connect with another human being. And how, when you actually connect with another human being, it feels like a miracle, it's one of the most amazing things to happen, but how do you dramatise it?"

Before Sunrise was, he says, the lowest-grossing movie ever to get a sequel. Still, in 2004, Hawke, Delpy and Linklater reunited to revisit the lovestruck couple nine years after their first meeting, this time writing the script together and filming in real time. "It's its own form of cinema, it's its own entity," he says proudly. "I think Chekhov would like Before Sunset because it's all about nuance. Any decent screenwriting school would throw that script out. There's no beginning, middle and end, it's completely fluid, just chasing the nuance of life, and kind of believing whatever God is lives in this kind of energy that flows between all of us." He smiles. "Something organic happened when we were writing together. It was so easy and so fun, and it went up all by itself." He looks rather wistful. "I kind of live for that, for that chance that you might get another opportunity to be a part of something like that." When we meet, Hawke has just had published an interview with Kris Kristofferson in Rolling Stone magazine. He says it was a way not only to pay tribute to one of his great heroes, but also to ease himself back into the process of writing. His first novel was published in 1996, though he began writing it while working on The Seagull. "I did it as an exercise when I was playing Konstantin, because Konstantin wanted to be a writer, and a writer friend suggested I try writing and give it to some people and see how insecure it makes you..." Those chapters became The Hottest State, "a first-person autobiographical thing" that met with mixed reviews. His second novel came in 2002, a stronger, more confident work, which he compares to a road movie and which garnered more acclaim. Now he is trying to work on something new. "I've been real shy about a third one. Probably because of my divorce - it took a huge amount of psychic energy. I also have an acting career. And there's only so much time. And I need to make sure I have something to say." He takes off the cap, runs his hand through his hair. "The older you get, the humbler you get," he says, still holding the cap. "I know I don't have that much to offer, and I know I've now read Moby Dick and Anna Karenina, and if I had read those books before I wrote The Hottest State, I don't think I'd have published it ..." He laughs. "I had the arrogance of the uneducated. Which sometimes you need." Hawke glances up at the window and smiles. "My wife is walking by with my baby!" He laughs. "She's going yak yak yak," he makes the hand gesture, "making fun of me and what a bullshit artist I am." Hawke and Shawhughes married last summer, shortly before the birth of their daughter, having got together after his split from Thurman. He seems to delight in speaking of her, peppering his conversation with references to "my wife". He has attributed the breakdown of his first marriage to the difficulty of being in a relationship with someone more successful than he was and, while his relationship with Thurman is now apparently amicable, the split was initially messy: he was spotted kissing another woman in a Montreal bar, heralding what he has described as "the most agonising period of my life". He moved out of the family home and into the Chelsea hotel, and the pair finalised their divorce in 2004. "The self-help section of every bookstore is full of long dissertations on the reasons for, and the remedies for, the pain of divorce," he says now. "Anything I could say about it would sound like a clichd country and western song." It is the steady presence of his

children that he misses most - it "hurts like a son of a bitch every day I don't get to parent them," he says. His new marriage has "taken me by complete surprise. I hesitate to speak about it because I've learned the hard way that the future often plays us all for fools, but Ryan and I are living through a rather blessed period of our life. She has been a wonderful, happy new mother, a great step-mother, a real instrument of healing in our family, and a much-needed partner for me in my kind of elaborate, varied and mercurial artistic life." That Shawhughes was once his children's nanny has been the source of much speculation, and he seems eager to set the record straight. "I met Ryan through my literary agent, and she was indeed one of Maya and Levon's nannies during a film shoot," he says calmly. "After a short period of working for me, Ryan went back to Columbia to get her degree. There were never any scandalous thoughts or actions back then. In the years that followed, my marriage disintegrated due to many pressures, none of which were remotely connected to Ryan." A year or so after the split with Thurman, he ran into Shawhughes in a park. "She has always been an extremely sensible, no-bullshit woman, and frankly I thought that might be good for a half-madman like me." It seems he enjoys this dynamic to their partnership - he mercurial, she steady. "So when she asked me out, I answered, 'Yes.' I know people imagine some kind of Sound Of Music type love affair, but the truth is by the time Ryan and I were falling in love, it had been a long while since I had employed her." He wasn't looking for a relationship when they met, he insists. "I was very cautious during that period of my life and desperately wanted to stay single - I definitely never wanted to get married again. But sometimes life happens to you. Now, I love Ryan tremendously." He attributes the success of the relationship to a deep-rooted familiarity. "The bottom line is we're incredibly compatible. We grew up in the same town, you know, all that old school shit your grandma told you: 'Make sure you're friends first, that you have things in common, that you like the same people. Are they kind? Do they challenge you intellectually?'" Shawhughes, when she joins us, is a small, dainty, blond woman with similar finedrawn features to her husband's. For a moment, Hawke stands with his daughter in the crook of his arm, pinches her tiny nose, and father and daughter grin broadly. I think of something he said earlier - "I would never have foreseen 10 years ago the twists my life has taken" - before glancing up, in one broad sweep taking in not only his career choices but also his divorce from Thurman and his new family. "But who knows," he had wondered, "which version would make me happier?" He expects more twists to come. "Next week Errol Flynn may steal my wife and a whole new chapter will begin. I could never work again, or things could just plod along, or I could do an amazing movie that zaps into the zeitgeist so much that it renders everything I've done until this point obsolete. Or I could slide into obscurity and become a footnote in the pop culture reference book." He tries to look rum, but looks a little sad. Does he think people will always see him as the slacker student, the pure, late face of Generation X? He pauses. "Do you?" he asks gently.