Actor, director and writer Ethan Hawke – known for films such as Boyhood, Before Sunrise and Training Day – talks to longtime friend and collaborator Hamilton Leithauser, frontman of The Walkmen and acclaimed solo artist whose scoring credits include Hawke’s documentary The Last Movie Stars. The pair discuss Hawke’s new show, The Lowdown, his role in Blue Moon, the politics of truth-telling and the power of art to cut through the noise
Hamilton Leithauser: It’s been a minute since we last saw each other. I think I saw your wife the other night, but you’ve been away filming your new show. Tell me about it – I saw the preview on the plane and laughed out loud.
Ethan Hawke: I appreciated that text. You may not know this, but you’re a huge inspiration to the show. Usually, I get to read a script before I say yes, but with this, it was just, ‘Do you want to do a show with Sterlin Harjo?’ and I said yes before even seeing a script. I told Sterlin, “I want this show to feel like a Hamilton Leithauser performance – when it’s over, you feel like someone gave you a piece of their heart.” I wanted to be sweaty and bloody at the end of this show.
HL: My wife was at your premiere and said the show is fantastic.
EH: Your wife is clearly very intelligent.
HL: She has very good taste – in men and television.
EH: I’m not sold on the man part.
HL: I just saw the preview – I think I saw it on your Instagram. I want to hear all about that.
EH: Well, I’m playing one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century . I know a lot of his songs: ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ – so many classics. What’s so interesting about the movie is you’re basically watching a human being die of heartbreak in real time. He was part of Rodgers and Hart for 25 years – they were the Lennon and McCartney of their generation. Then Hart, the character I play, his drinking got so incorrigible that Rodgers decided to move on and did a new show with a young fellow named Oscar Hammerstein. They went on to have a 17-year collaboration. So it’s kind of like Lennon and McCartney break up, and then McCartney starts a new band that’s bigger than the Beatles ever were. That’s what happened to Larry Hart. He loved Richard Rodgers – they were best friends for 25 years. He goes to this opening night party to try to convince his old friend that he’s ready to work again, that he’s sobering up and ready to put in the real effort. But it’s too late. The ship already sailed, and his friend has already moved on. He has to sit there at the opening night party for Oklahoma! and try to be a good sport.
HL: And how long did he live, does the movie go into that?
EH: It’s a classic Linklater movie. It’s 90 minutes of real time. You watch him walk into the party, meet everybody, and 90 minutes later, you realise he’s going to drink himself to death and he’ll be dead in five months.
HL: Your hair looks fantastic in the preview by the way, I gotta say.
EH: Dude, that combover killed my soul. My vanity took such a hit. I had to grow the edges of my hair long, and then I had to shave the middle of my hair so I could do this combover. But if you didn’t do the combover, you looked like Bozo the Clown. Luckily, it was the hardest I ever worked in my life with that part, so I didn’t even go out.
HL: So you did that after you did the Oklahoma trip?
EH: No, I did Blue Moon first, and then I went to Tulsa. What about you? Are you on the road with Pulp?
HL: I’m on the road with Pulp, yeah.
EH: I love Pulp. There was a time in my life where I wanted to be Jarvis , he just seemed like the coolest guy in the world.
HL: He is cool. He still is.
EH: How’s their music?
HL: It’s great. They put on a really big show every night. And I think people enjoy my show also. Right now I’m in Milwaukee, doing a headline show with my band tonight. Pulp’s taking two days off, so I was like, fuck it, I’ll just do a show here, and then we’re going to play in Minneapolis with them.
EH: I love Milwaukee.
HL: Milwaukee is awesome. There’s always something cool to find here. You can still find a huge, really cool bookstore that actually has reasonable prices, which you don’t see anymore these days. I just bought a huge stack of books and art which was totally affordable. And it’s right downtown. There’s nobody on the sidewalk, which is probably not a great sign for the city’s economics, but it’s a pleasure to walk around on a beautiful sunny day.
EH: I love it. I was there last summer. We screened Wildcat in this old movie theatre, the kind of place that looks like Gone With the Wind premiered out. They have an organ and a balcony, and it’s awesome. 1,000 seats, and the place was sold out, and it rocked and rolled. I just got such a good feeling from that whole city.
HL: We’ve had some good times here over the years.
EH: What’s it feel like as you ride around the country right now?
HL: With the media stuff?
EH: In the Lowdown show, I’m playing a journalist – a guy who’s hellbent on showing the benefits of telling the truth. It doesn’t matter if it’s within a family: if there’s a problem and you’re not honest about it, you’ll never heal. The same goes for society – if you’re not facing the truth, you won’t grow or heal; you’ll just stay stuck with the same issues.
Sterlin used to work for a free press in Tulsa and saw the benefits of honest reporting firsthand. In the 1990s, they were covering stories about the Tulsa race massacre, and witnessed the healing that happened in the community when people shared a reality based on truth, instead of covering things up. My character in the show is inspired by a friend and mentor Sterlin had when he was young, a journalist named Lee Roy Chapman. So, my character is based on him. A kind of Don Quixote, going after big money.
HL: Are you still a journalist in the show?
EH: In the show, I run a used bookstore but still write for local magazines, trying to expose how the affluent take advantage of the underclass. I keep getting knocked down for it. I was even on Good Morning America this morning, saying to George Stephanopoulos that if you tell the truth, sometimes you get punched in the nose.
My grandfather’s generation understood democracy and the value of a middle class. Now, with the internet, it’s like the Tower of Babel – so much confusion, and people are afraid to speak honestly. Even in this interview, I’m aware of how I’m speaking, and that fear isn’t good. It’s easy to get distracted by things that don’t matter while ignoring what really does.
HL: And journalists now face real threats – some need 24/7 security because of the backlash, just for asking tough questions.
EH: Exactly. Sometimes it feels like, ‘what country am I living in?’ Until people feel the loss of their freedoms, nothing will change. The powers that be profit from compliance, and no one feels motivated to take a stand.
HL: I want to hear some funny stories from your show – were you having a ball the whole time?
EH: The sad truth is, I never had so much fun in my life. There’s a punk rock spirit happening in Tulsa. That part of the country has been dealing with all the problems that we’re citing right now for a long time. The state has all of the major issues, from the Native populations, the issue of race, the oil money land barons. They’ve got a history of corruption. The community is very awake to all these issues. They’re very present. The art has a present tense-ness to it, and the music history is great, from the Gap Band and Leon Russell to Bob Wills, Cain’s Ballroom, the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center. You’ve got Larry Clark . It’s a place that has a high regard for creativity. Apartments are cheap, so our students can find a place to live, create and be wild. You feel that in the film community. We did have fun – we had Killer Mike in the show.
HL: Oh yeah, Killer Mike. You got so many people in that show.
EH: [My character] writes for two newspapers. One is a longform magazine and it aspires to be like The Paris Review of Oklahoma. The other one I write for is the Tulsa Beat, which is booty and bad guys, and Killer Mike’s newspaper. I have these two different duelling editors, where if one won’t publish, maybe the other one will. It’s been so fun to watch somebody as smart as Mike is, who has achieved so much success at one artistic medium, but he’s still got a beginner’s mind about acting. He’s so excited by it and so turned on.
HL: Is it like tongue-in-cheek, or is he fully in character?
EH: He’s fully in character. I’m not into the tongue-in-cheek thing. We’re trying to create a real world that you can smell. Sterlin likes the same thing. You’re going to love it. And there’s so much JJ Cale and Leon Russell – it’s awesome. The music of the street is very much a part of the show. Then we have Tim Blake Nelson and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who are like Oklahoma royalty. That was pretty fun.
HL: That’s awesome, I can’t wait to see this thing. When does it come out?
EH: September 23. My job right now is to tell people the first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get your beautiful wife and watch this. You’re gonna sit down with her and stream the first two episodes, and then you’re gonna text your friend Ethan and say –
HL: Yeah, dude, nothing but praise.
EH: Are you hitting the studio anytime soon?
HL: I got a movie coming out that I scored that I’m really proud of. I don’t know how they’re debuting. I don’t know how stuff works. You know more than me.
EH: Well, I have this theory that I’m going to put here in print. I hope that you are going to have this whole other act of your career like Randy Newman, who I think is a genius rock and roller, and happens to be one of the best people to score a movie in the history of the world. With your sense of melody and musicianship, you’re ready to take that torch.
HL: I’m ready. My hand is open and I’m running.
EH: For those that don’t know, we have been friends for a long time through mutual friends, but we really got to know each other because Ham scored The Last Movie Stars, which was a six-hour documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Ham made the whole thing sparkle and shine. His music is all over it.
One of the best nights of my life is the night we became friends. It was a New Year’s Eve party where we did an old fashioned guitar pull all night long, and we stayed up way too late. But that’s where I had the idea. Do you remember when Ben Dickey started playing a Blaze Foley song, and I had the idea that he should play Blaze Foley in a movie?
HL: Oh, that’s where you came up with that. I had been friends with this guy since long before I even knew you. He was not an actor, and then I went and saw Blaze, and he’s up there crying, delivering this crying speech. I couldn’t believe it.
EH: He’s amazing in the movie. But that gets to my theory about you and a lot of other people – Killer Mike for example – that if you have access to creativity, it can manifest in a lot of different fields, especially if you do it with humility and discipline, which Ben did. He took the idea of acting in that part incredibly seriously. He worried about it morning, noon and night. In Philly, he would be playing with his band, the Blood Feathers, and they were so much fun. I could watch him hold an audience in his hand, and the charisma I knew would translate into his work as an actor.
HL: You balance big projects with smaller, more personal ones. Do you find yourself turning to those to stay grounded?
EH: There’s a direct inverse correlation between how much you get paid and how substantive the job is. The more meaningful the work, the less you get paid. But those projects keep me growing and connected to the art. The trick is to focus on what you can give to the profession, not what it can give to you. I had a really great 20s, met a lot of amazing people, and was really idealistic about the power of storytelling and the arts. The arts really represent the collective mental health of a culture. When it’s vibrant, ideas are flowing, and light is shining in all the dark places – you have a healthy culture. When it’s dark, and all anybody’s trying to do is sell cheeseburgers, the whole thing atrophies. My goal was never to be a big shot.
HL: Sometimes you get lucky and a passion project breaks through.
EH: Exactly. Every now and then, you thread the needle – like Boyhood, which we worked on for 12 years. Sometimes the crazy, avant-garde projects find their place, and it’s important to keep doing them for the sake of our collective mental health. Every now and then you get absurdly lucky, and it works, and it finds a place in the marketplace, and people really appreciate it. But I think it’s so important that we do those things because sometimes they break through.
Hawke wears J.Crew
Photography Ian Kenneth Bird
Styling Mitchell Belk
Grooming Jennifer Brent at Forward Artists using 111SKIN and Kiehl’s
Production Hyperion NY
Photography assistants Fallou Seck and Anthony Lorelli
This article is taken from Port issue 37. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
