![]() ![]() As he has recounted several times, hardly a day goes by without someone shouting “Carpe diem!” at him. It didn’t come to that: Weir cast him as Todd Anderson, the shy teenager who, in the final scene, climbs onto his desk and shouts Walt Whitman’s epic “Oh, Captain, my Captain!” The film’s success and influence exceeded all expectations. After racking up rejections, including the Stand By Me character that Phoenix ended up playing, he decided that if he didn’t get the part, he would join the U.S. His next audition was for Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society. “My first screen partner overdosed on Sunset Boulevard, you know? He was the brightest light and this industry chewed him up, and that was a big lesson to me.” The cast of 'Dead Poets Society.' Francois Duhamel (Sygma via Getty Images) He confessed to The Guardian that his aversion to making big Hollywood movies stemmed from Phoenix’s death. Hawke’s first film experience did not make him an instant star, but it indirectly taught him a lesson that he surely would have preferred not to receive. “America has cast its vote, and Ethan Hawke is not a star,” he heard one executive say. “We were sure we were going to be movie stars.” On the day of the premiere, they hid in the lavatory of the Ziegfeld Theater to listen to the reviews they were not flattering. Six months later he was starring in Explorers alongside River Phoenix. ![]() When Hawke was 12, his mother enrolled him in an acting course. The contrast between the worlds of his mother and father made Hawke an expert at fitting in everywhere, a contemporary Zelig. When they left the theater, they read Pauline Kael’s vitriolic reviews in The New Yorker together. For his fifth birthday, she chose to take him to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When he was four and could not yet read, she took him to see Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage in the original version with subtitles. He played up his intellectual side with his mother, with whom life was unconventional. I hated myself for it,” he told The New Yorker. I was aware that I was performing for him. To please his father, a deeply religious conservative, he would talk about soccer and religion, even faking a Southern accent. He considers his parents’ separation to be his first acting lesson. Hawke was, and remains, involved in that work and committed to the rights of minorities. Hawke’s parents separated when he was four years old and he went to live with his mother, who raised him between temporary jobs and lots of social activity: she was a teacher, joined the Peace Corps and founded a charity that helps provide education to Romanian children. Pool BENAINOUS/REGLAIN (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) When he was born, his father was 18 and his mother was 17 he was named Ethan because his mother thought the name would look good on the cover of a book. Unlike Pedro Pascal, his co-star in Strange Way of Life - whom the world discovered in his 40s - Hawke grew up in front of the camera. His latest critical success came with the documentary The Last Movie Stars in which he honors icons like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and exorcises his own demons. The actor is well-acquainted with the genre (he participated in director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven) and complex relationships. Now, at 52, Hawke co-stars in Strange Way of Life, director Pedro Almodóvar’s Western film that just premiered at Cannes. If Hannah from Girls aspired to be the voice of a generation, Ethan Hawke is, to his regret, the face of generation X, which has been reviled by those who belong to it, depicted by Douglas Coupland and deified by fashion magazines. Or as normal as one can be as a generational icon with four Oscar nominations and a four-decade-long career an attractive man who formed one of the most beautiful couples of the 1990s with Uma Thurman a writer, screenwriter, director and musician Tennessee Williams’ second cousin twice removed and, above all, a symbol. In Cannes, among models and Instagram stars with many followers and little filmography, as well as unrealistically white teeth, Hawke looked like a normal person. And we don’t talk about how Mother Teresa would have been better if she could have lost 15 pounds, because she was a woman of God.” Nobody ever talks about Eleanor Roosevelt’s crooked teeth, because she was a woman of substance. “I just hate how homogenized people want us all to be. ![]() And then crazy Sean Penn got on stage, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a human being.’” He decided that day that he wouldn’t get his teeth fixed. “I watched the Oscars on TV a few years ago, and they all looked like they were pod people. When a former agent asked him to fix them, he got angry. Ethan Hawke is proud of his crooked teeth. ![]()
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