In praise of the ultra-versatile actor ahead of his stunning character turn in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon
Although you’d be forgiven for not realising it due to his evergreen boyish charm, 2025 marks 40 years of Ethan Hawke’s screen acting career. Never one to rest on his laurels, Hawke is hitting the milestone with three major projects landing concurrently in autumn of 2025: as the leading man in Sterlin Harjo’s star-studded FX show The Lowdown; returning as The Grabber in the sequel to Blumhouse box office success in Black Phone 2; and as Lorenz Hart in the latest film with long-time collaborator Richard Linklater, Blue Moon.
Hawke is the gravitational charisma of all three projects, and the roles could not be more different from one another. Adaptability, creativity, and risk-taking have defined his work across four decades to a point that it is almost undefinable. A player across genres, Hawke is a movie star that most wouldn’t identify as a movie star in the traditional sense – and yet, there is his name above the title.
The craft of acting is often most lauded when a performer “disappears into the role”, although with Hawke, it might be best to speak of someone who disappears within the role, or at least amongst them. Trying to define him, or even to summarise his career within a short article, would be a foolish task, as to do it any kind of justice would require a hefty tome. Outside of film and TV acting credits, one must take into account a significant stage career, directorial credits in both fiction and documentary, screenwriting, producing, and many other roles including father, novelist, philanthropist, podcast star, and even a Taylor Swift music video.
Hawke arrived on the big screen soaring over the ILM-created computer chips of his character Ben’s dreams in Joe Dante’s Explorers. The film was perhaps overlooked on release, coming off the back of the success of Dante’s Gremlins and landing as part of the suburban outcasts-on-bikes young adult cycle of the 1980s, alongside more successful titles including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Goonies, and Stand by Me. Although through no fault of his own as the compelling, intellectual lead, its relative lack of success saw a disillusioned Hawke briefly quit acting after his first film.
Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society saw him return as a young man and an already gifted performer. As new kid Todd Anderson, Hawke captured the quiet stoicism of a repressed son who, through guidance, becomes eloquent and grows in confidence. The foundations of the subdued performance underlie the powerful emotional release following the suicide of his friend Neil; the authentic barbaric yawp of grief for the character and a momentous arrival for the actor. Hawke’s screen career following Dead Poets Society is littered with films, roles, performances, and collaborations that most actors would kill to have just a few of in their career: Alive, Reality Bites, Gattaca, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Training Day, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Born to Be Blue, First Reformed, and more.
Although not as fluctuating a filmography as those of prolific peers like Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe, there are, of course, misfires. Perhaps most notably 2004’s Taking Lives opposite Angelina Jolie, a thriller that sounds so promising on paper, but also in a number of generic-sounding titles you’d be forgiven for not having heard of: Regression, Cymbeline, Getaway, Staten Island. Although something of a rolling stone, it is his long-time collaborative relationship with director Richard Linklater that has perhaps seen Hawke most often hit the peak of his creativity in cinema. Over a period of 30 years since Before Sunrise began the trilogy, their nine films together include The Newton Boys, Fast Food Nation, Boyhood, and now, Blue Moon.
Alongside the aforementioned Before Trilogy, the similarly episodic but self-contained Boyhood is arguably not only beloved due to the strength of its drama but also because we feel, as an audience, that we come to know the characters. In the former, alongside Julie Delpy as Céline, we follow Hawke as Jesse across eighteen years, and much of its appeal is in following the couple from the tingle of first love and excitement of new romance to marital difficulties and personal insecurities, a relationship authentically played with unflinching accuracy across the years. It may also be that we are allowed to come to know its performers as co-creators which, particularly in Hawke’s case, is a consistency of insight that is hard to grasp across a shape-shifting career.
Elsewhere with Linklater, it is the deft risk-taking that has often defined Hawke’s work that is at play. Both Tape and Waking Life are formally experimental and innovative; the former a microbudget film shot entirely on Mini DV, while the latter continued the experimentation of the early digital era by rotoscoping over the footage to produce an animated feature The two films were a response to the box office failure of The Newton Boys and a willing one-eighty from the mainstream. Although not as stark, some of this spirit carries into Blue Moon, which takes both a creatively technical approach to taking almost a foot off Hawke’s height to play Lorenz Hart. The experiment of stature is worthwhile, as Hart is a rapid-fire raconteur of wit and desperation that it is hard to imagine many other leading film actors shaping as successfully.
Hawke is the consummate actor’s actor in Blue Moon, and his generosity to scene partners is symptomatic of his ever-present desire to serve the work. His Hart takes nothing of the shine away from scenes with Bobby Cannavale, Margaret Qualley, Simon Delaney, or the devastating exchanges with a pitch-perfect Andrew Scott as his former partner, Richard Rodgers. Blue Moon marries two of Hawke’s greatest talents: gifted physicality and the ability to deliver incredibly complex dialogue naturally.
This ability can also be seen in The Lowdown, though in a different vernacular. The razor-sharp, neo-noir dialogue of The Lowdown gives the actor a lot of great lines to work with as Lee Raybon, a flailing Tulsa “Truthstorian” on a mission to shine light on injustice. An intellectual schlub, the juxtaposition of a slovenly, vaping bookstore owner delivering delicious detective drawl like, “I want to set off a flare, kick up the rocks, and see what the roaches do at night,” is intoxicating. On a recent podcast about the craft of acting, Hawke remarked that his approach comes from a place of positivity, asking himself, “How can I take this bad line and make it OK? How can I take this good line and make it great?” In instances like these, where the writing is evidently great, Hawke is able to set it completely on fire.
In interviews, Hawke is similarly verbose and just as flowing, particularly when talking about an appreciation of the arts. Observing an interview in which he breaks down his iconic characters, Hawke talks generously of others ahead of himself. In his appearance in The Criterion Closet with Jonathan Marc Sherman, he switches between a tongue-in-cheek but knowing appreciation of his own work and writing in the Before Trilogy and a humble yearning that the career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder makes him feel under-accomplished.
There’s a sense that Hawke has the clarity of self-awareness of his position and achievements in the industry, yet there is the transparency of humility and a hunger to always do more, which makes him refreshing amongst his peers, an actor not too concerned to take risks but also not so flippant as to allow prolificacy to override quality. As the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler famously noted, “The talent is in the choices.”
For Hawke, his choices and curiosity have paid off. An actor at home in independent, arthouse cinema, he has also made the choice not to shun mainstream or genre film, successfully working in westerns, science fiction, and horror. In the latter, Hawke’s continuing collaborations with Jason Blum — including Sinister, The Purge, In the Valley of Violence, and The Good Lord Bird — led to a re-teaming with director Scott Derrickson for The Black Phone.
In the role of The Grabber, the masked Hawke’s physicality conveys the character’s sinister presence. With both chilling stillness and a presence of intimidating strength, Hawke’s physical manner is a part of what makes the villain so disturbing. Added to this is the ability to shift gears through years of acting range, from childlike to violent to profoundly disturbed. As The Grabber stands half-masked with tears in his eyes and says, “I just wanted to look at you”, the result is so effectively disconcerting that it is unquestionable that Hawke’s performance is a part of what made the horror resonate with audiences.
With the release of Black Phone 2 and Blue Moon, alongside the upcoming She Dances, which premiered at Tribeca in June, 2025 is undoubtedly another high watermark in a distinguished career, and a refreshing full return to form. With the likelihood of awards buzz in 2026 and several film and television projects currently in production, including talks of a possible tenth feature with Richard Linkater, there is no sign of Hawke slowing down at the milestone of four decades.
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