Ethan Hawke on his Oscar-nominated performance in 'Blue Moon'

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Ethan Hawke has been acting since he was a teenager. Now at 55, he has his first Oscar nomination for best actor for his role in the film “Blue Moon.”

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown sat down with Hawke recently in New York for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Ethan Hawke, Actor: OK, best line in “Casablanca.”

Bobby Cannavale, Actor: Nobody ever loved me that much.

Ethan Hawke: Nobody ever loved me that much. Isn’t that magnificent?

Jeffrey Brown: In the movie, “Blue Moon” sat almost entirely on one night at Broadway’s famous Sardi’s Restaurant, a nearly unrecognizable Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz “Larry” Hart, one of the most brilliant lyricists in musical theater history.

But now at a party not celebrating him, he knows his time has passed. And there’s little left but to drink, talk, and talk some more, often with the bartender played by Bobby Cannavale.

Ethan Hawke: And, really, who’s ever been loved enough? Who’s ever been loved half enough? Would you get me a shot?

Jeffrey Brown: You talk and talk.

Ethan Hawke: And I talk and talk and talk.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Ethan Hawke: I had this feeling about the performance that he walks into this opening night party the way a human being walks in front of a firing squad. The only way to stop it is to talk.

Jeffrey Brown: So you had a lot of lines to learn, for one thing.

Ethan Hawke: That’s true too.

Jeffrey Brown: The real Lorenz Hart was part of the Rodgers and Hart team that wrote such indelible songs as “My Funny Valentine, “A Lady is a Tramp,” and, yes, “Blue Moon.”

Bobby Cannavale: You’re unique.

Ethan Hawke: Sounds like you’re writing my obituary.

Jeffrey Brown: But the film captures the moment in 1943 when Rodgers, played by Andrew Scott, has had it with Hart’s drinking and unreliability and teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein for the new musical “Oklahoma,” the start of an even more renowned partnership, leaving Hart behind.

Ethan Hawke: From the moment we enter crying to the moment we leave dying, it’ll just cover your face as you wail and cry and scream.

Jeffrey Brown: Ethan Hawke first made his name as a teenager in the 1989 film “Dead Poets Society” with Robin Williams, and has built a career in film, including the “Beyond” series and “Boyhood,” both for the director Richard Linklater, on stage here on Broadway in Sam Shepard’s “True West” with Paul Dano, and on TV, currently on FX’s “The Lowdown.”

Ethan Hawke: I love it.

Jeffrey Brown: In “Blue Moon,” he’s once again teamed up with Linklater and playing a man nearly a foot shorter than himself, here with Margaret Qualley.

Do I see Ethan Hawke? Or you’re disappearing into that character?

Ethan Hawke: You have to start by getting rid of everything that you identify as you, places of extreme confidence, the way I like to gesture all the time, the way that I like to speak. You start getting extremely simple about it and then it can become additive.

Jeffrey Brown: Is that a challenge? Is it also fun?

Ethan Hawke: It’s fun? Have you ever skied to slope that’s too difficult for you,and you get to the bottom of the hill and you think, ah, that was fun? It wasn’t fun while you were doing it. It’s fun because you survived.

Jeffrey Brown: Right. Right.

Ethan Hawke: And when you’re doing independent film, there’s just no room for error, you know?

Jeffrey Brown: Yes. You mean time-wise, production-wise, money-wise?

Ethan Hawke: Yes. We prepped this movie for about 10 years, and we had 15 days to shoot it.

Jeffrey Brown: Really?

Ethan Hawke: So…

Jeffrey Brown: So it has to work.

Ethan Hawke: You can’t have an off-day, or this movie won’t work.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

For Hawke, this is also a kind of love letter to a place and time.

This film really is in old New York.

Ethan Hawke: It is.

Jeffrey Brown: You like that?

Ethan Hawke: It’s — you know, I’m in love with this city. And I’m in love with its history.

Jeffrey Brown: Hawke clearly loves both the art and craft of acting and other actors. In 2022, he directed a documentary series called “The Last Movie Stars” about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and told me of a lesson he applied to his portrayal of Hart.

Ethan Hawke: Newman used to talk about this thing I love, the correlation of opposites. And he was also really thinking about Brando, that Brando was so extremely masculine and so feminine at the same time.

And it creates this duality where you’re kind of, like, which way is the scale going to tip? Like, who is this person? You can’t take your eyes off them. And Larry Hart was full of opposites. He’s the most diminutive person in the room and he’s the biggest person in the room.

Jeffrey Brown: Personality-wise, yes.

Ethan Hawke: Yes. He hates himself and he’s arrogant. He’s gay and he’s in love with a woman. I mean, everything that I had to play, I had the — I could play the opposite too.

Jeffrey Brown: This is a person, in fact, who’s a theater artist, right, who’s known enormous success and is now finding himself irrelevant.

Now, I have to ask you, how much you feel it resonates with anything you have experienced?

Ethan Hawke: You can’t be in the arts and not feel the vicissitudes of life, the power of hot spotlight when you’re in “Dead Poets Society” and everybody loves it and everything’s amazing.

It makes ordinary temperature feel extremely cold.

Jeffrey Brown: Right. And you felt that? You felt that cold?

Ethan Hawke: I felt certain I was washed up, I mean, certain I was washed up at least three different periods I could point to where — now, funnily enough, with the benefit of hindsight, those start to be the best times of my life, in hindsight, because when everybody’s patting you on your back, it’s not a great time for growth.

When everybody thinks you’re an idiot, often, strangely, you kind of wake up in the morning like, I’m not an idiot, and I’m going to show that.

Jeffrey Brown: Do you feel good about where you’re at now?

Ethan Hawke: Well, I’d be absolutely foolish if I didn’t. I mean, I’m — A, I’m alive. I have four kids and a wife who loves me. And I get to do work I believe in. And the older I get, the more the work that I’m putting out into the world is work that it’s connected to me, that I care about.

I care about this movie that I’m talking to you about today. It’s not a job to me. It’s tied up in my friendships. It’s about New York theater. It’s about people I love. It’s about music that I love. I don’t mind asking — I have no shame in asking somebody if they’d like to see the movie.

I think it’d be 90 minutes well spent, you know? And that’s something I’m proud of.

Jeffrey Brown: That feels good?

Ethan Hawke: Yes, that feels really good. And then there’s the point of where you’re like, if you had told me when I started, when I was 18, that I would be being interviewed by you when I was 55 years old, I would think that I had made it. I would feel pretty good about that.

(Crosstalk)

Jeffrey Brown: … combination?

Ethan Hawke: Yes, I would feel pretty good about that.

“The Heart Is Quicker Than the Eye,” it’s not a great song, but it’s a good title. And it’s true.

Jeffrey Brown: Ethan Hawke as Larry Hart vies for his Oscar on March 15.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.