Art

Veteran film and theater actor Ethan Hawke talks about horror movies, selling out and James Baldwin's New York

Ethan Hawke cocks his head and furrows his brow. “After struggling for five years,” he says, in the affected voice of a self-important pundit, “he has finally arrived.” He’s talking about himself, and the media’s tendency to package his life in a way that makes for good magazine copy, particularly in the years following his highly publicized split from actress Uma Thurman in 2004. “First of all, that’s your perception that you thought I was struggling,” Hawke says. “Those could’ve been the best years of my life.”

We are sitting downstairs at The Player’s Club in Gramercy Park, opposite a pool table and a large portrait of Mark Twain. Hawke is telling me about his new play Clive, currently showing at the off-Broadway Acorn Theatre, and based on Bertold Brecht’s Baal, a play about wasted youth, sex, murder and lots of liquor. The original play, which is not actually a play, says Hawke, but rather “a work of expressionism,” is set in 1918 Germany and traces the sexual exploits of a drunken, debauched poet.

The new version, written by Hawke’s longtime friend and collaborator, Jonathan Marc Sherman, is described in press notes as a play about “a songwriter in the ’90s” living in New York City. Not exactly, says Hawke. “They describe it as a story about a songwriter so it seems like a real play. It’s actually about the layers of hell.” Still, Hawke admits, “Part of the experience of this play is to try and recreate the New York that I wanted to see.”

That New York is a complex palate of strewn-about memories, side streets where Hawke has filmed so many movies, coffee shops where he has written and read scripts and stories and the infamous Chelsea Hotel, his “church of choice,” where he lived following his divorce from Thurman. “It was a really, really wonderful place to be depressed,” he recalls. “It made depression Gothic. It made depression important.”

Since first moving to New York after the success of Dead Poets Society in 1989, Hawke has made more than 30 films, appeared in dozens of plays and co-founded the theater group Malaparte with Jonathan Marc Sherman. Despite his movie-star marriage to Thurman and having shot loads of films there, Hawke has never felt drawn to live in L.A., a place, he says, “that turns movies into business.” Hawke says, “You go into the arts to be on the periphery of society, you want to be kind of an outlaw, and L.A. kind of usurps that energy and tries to turn it into something you can sell.”

Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke cues up at The Players Club in Gramercy Park.

New York, says Hawke, fuels his need to be around other creative minds and to maintain a certain measure of artistic credibility. “I had this dream of being that prototype New York actor, and I don’t know exactly what that meant, but I always pictured Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman living in a seven-floor walk-up tenement house reading Stanislavski and Eugene O’Neill,” he says. “The mental image of L.A. is Corvettes and bikinis. I liked Allen Ginsberg’s New York. I liked James Baldwin’s New York.”

Clive also features “sonic sculptures” — seven doors made of recycled and found materials that are played as instruments by the actors onstage. The doors, says co-creator Shelby Gaines (who, with his brother Latham, form the art duo GAINES), represent “an attractive ambiguity,” an idea that reflects the New York of Ginsberg or Baldwin, who once described the city as “spitefully incoherent.” As Hawke and I discuss our shared respect for the originality of GAINES’ work, which has thus far existed below the radar, it is clear that he is eagerly grateful to have been able to include their pieces in the play — a creative choice that perhaps makes him less the movie star, more the artist.

Like many artists, Hawke is often faced with that age-old conundrum of how to remain true to his work and also earn a living. As the father of four — two older kids with Thurman and two young kids with his current wife, Ryan — Hawke admits that he struggles to reconcile having to make certain types of movies in order to keep the home fires burning. “I have a certain aesthetic that I believe in, and the kind of art I want to make,” Hawke says. “Making horror movies has never been a part of that.” Last fall, Hawke starred in the horror mystery Sinister (which grossed approximately $48 million) and will appear next in the sci-fi thriller The Purge. “It’s a tough line to walk when you’re trying to pay your bills ­— which choice violates my integrity as a father, which one violates my integrity as an artist and when do I need to keep my sense of humor alive and realize that my integrity is not so fragile?”

By now the photographer has arrived, and Hawke shifts effortlessly into camera-ready mode, setting up the pool table and launching into a story about the founder of The Player’s Club, Edwin Booth, “the Brad Pitt of his era. Even better, really. And, of course, his brother shot Lincoln.” After he breaks the rack, he looks up at the camera, romantically intent, portrait of an aging artist. Suddenly, I am struck by his palpable ambivalence toward being the guy who doesn’t care, and the guy who really cares a lot. And even more so, by the very faint lines of a heart on his sleeve.