Ethan Hawke: ‘The Money and the Greedy Bastards That Think They Control Everybody, They Always Lose in the End’

Training Day was the first nomination you received. I asked you the last time we sat down, “Did that feel like the beginning of something or the end of something?” And you said something very interesting. You said, “It could have been the beginning of something, but then I got divorced and my personal life fell apart.”

[Laughs.] I told you the truth!

Is that uncommon, to tell the truth?

Yeah, in public. It’s scary. to tell the truth. The world’s cold and mean, and people are critical, and people aren’t your best friend. They see things through a lens that sometimes maybe it’s accurate, but it can be uncomfortable. But yeah, that was the truth. That was a professional high-water mark that then quickly turned into a personal disaster zone.

In preparing for this, I read your most recent novel, 2021’s A Bright Ray of Darkness, which seems to be very much about this period. For those that don’t know the plot of this book, it’s about an actor who is going through marital troubles, castigating himself for infidelity and drug use while starring in the play Henry IV on Broadway, which you actually did—the last part, anyway.

I don’t know how other people write, but I am an actor and I like to direct and I like to write, and I’ve learned about them through the centerpiece of my life being acting. You hear this phrase autofiction—it’s like I have a shadow self. And for example, the Before trilogy, Jesse, there’s certain things that happened to me that I feel like, “Ooh, that could happen to Jesse and that could be…” And it starts to take on a story and a narrative. Jesse’s not me, but there’s an aspect of me that is like Jesse. And likewise, with William Harding in A Bright Ray of Darkness, it’s like a shadow self. There’s aspects pulled from other people. There’s aspects pulled from my real life. I kind of bought that whole write what you know thing they tell you in school. Don DeLillo would have to do 30 years of research to know what I know about the life of an actor. So if I wanted to contribute, I should probably use that experience.

And what I really wanted to write about was the healing transformative power of art. And so I had to create a character that was going through a depression, to use what I know about depression and let him be transformed by an experience. I’m pulling all 25, 30 years of experience in the theater to create this fictional show. I had to pick a play I’d done before because I wanted to pick one I knew intimately and had something to say about. It seemed to fit the themes that I was writing about. I don’t even feel in control of that part of my brain. It’s not like you wake up in the morning and think, “I want to write this.” I just find myself doing it and it feels healthy and it feels rewarding to me and I just kind of follow that voice. Does that make sense?