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.
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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.