Settle in, because Ethan Hawke has given an interview. Ethan is famously chatty and famously great at giving interviews. He loves to name-drop and gossip about the brilliance and tragedy of his friends and coworkers. Ethan is currently promoting Black Phone 2, The Lowdown and (mostly) Blue Moon, which was directed by Hawke’s long-time collaborator Richard Linklater. Ethan spoke to GQ Hype about Blue Moon and what life is like in his 50s after a career where he mostly avoided “selling out.” The kids don’t care about selling out anymore, but Ethan cares! Some highlights:

Reality Bites made him famous. “That was the moment that went from me being an actor to people knowing my name. Oh, he’s one of those Dead Poets guys’ turned into ‘Oh, he’s him.’”

He’s not a sellout: “Some people’s initial north star is to be f–king rich and have an aeroplane. I was super interested in the people who made a real contribution to the arts. I’m a believer. That can come off pretentious, but it’s so much better than being cynical. Cynicism kind of breaks your kneecaps.”

In Blue Moon, he plays Lorenz Hart: Hart is the lyricist who, alongside songwriting partner Richard Rodgers, gave the world melancholy standards like “My Funny Valentine”. “People like Lorenz, they’re like an antenna, absorbing all the confusing, beautiful, wonderful, sad, tragic, heroic elements mixed into each other, and it kind of breaks their brain. They feel things. And we need those things to be felt.”

He auditioned for Titanic: He auditioned for Leonardo DiCaprio’s role in Titanic, but, in retrospect, feels relieved he didn’t land it. “I don’t think I would have handled that success as well as Leo. He was a f–king Beatle.”

The tabloid attention he got when he was married to Uma Thurman: “It’s humiliating. It’s almost humiliating even when they’re saying positive things.”

Falling for Uma: “Have you ever played Spin the Bottle?” he says, when I ask why actors often fall in love on set. “There’s a certain intimacy to the work that we do. Imaginative intimacy. It’s such a high. It feels dangerous and thrilling. It turns the temperature up in your life. It can be like falling in love at summer camp. It doesn’t have any connection to the dailiness of real life. That’s the danger of it.”

He’s not a movie star: “I never self-identified as a ‘movie star’. I was allergic to that. Having a trademark by my name and making a million dollars – that wasn’t part of my dream.”

His Oscar nom for Training Day: “I didn’t campaign at all. Nobody took an ad out for me. Now, it’s political in a way. We can thank Harvey Weinstein for turning it into a junket. The industry learned that you can make money off those awards, so they started investing.”

Not in it for the money: “Money is as money does. You can use it for freedom. A lot of the best movies I’ve done don’t pay you very well. You’ve got to do something that’s relevant to contemporary audiences. The idea of artistic integrity is a real balancing act. Paul Schrader can want you but if he can’t raise the money with you attached, you’re going to lose that role. It’s a riddle. If you pay attention to it too much, you lose the plot.”

Understanding fame: “My wife is really funny. We’ll go out to dinner and I’ll go, ‘God, that waiter was rude.’ And she’ll say, ‘They weren’t rude. They [just] didn’t recognise you. They were normal. You’re just used to everybody smiling when they see you or offering you an extra thing or moving you up in line,’” he says. “The problem with that kind of attention is that a normal temperature feels cold. When you get tickets to the game and you’re sitting 10 rows back and not the front, you feel like someone f–ked you over.”

Hope for the future: “I like seeing young people who care. I like seeing people who aren’t interested in the algorithm. If you spend your life dedicated to the arts, that’s about maintaining a connection to yourself and not trying to think about what other people might want to receive.”

[From GQ Hype]

I appreciate that he points out that having a profile or fame certainly helps those small, arty movies get made. He IS a celebrity, but as GQ says, he’s in the sweet spot of “being a celebrity or well-known actor” yet he’s not a tabloid fixture or famous to the point where people are constantly in his business. Mostly though, it feels like Ethan is a real throwback to the kind of “anti-sellout, anti-commercialism” Gen X ideology which really doesn’t exist anymore. Even the younger actors name-checked in this piece (like Paul Mescal) want to sell out in big, commercial blockbusters, they just dress it up as “I just wanted to work with that director or that actor.” Which, fair enough, but Ethan avoids that as well. To Ethan, that’s still vapid commercialism.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of GQ Hype.