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“You don’t have to beat the system,” Ethan Hawke tells me on today’s special bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “You just have to do the best you can do each given day, and if we collectively do that, everything is actually gonna work out.”
Coming from anyone else, this might sound like a simple platitude. But in 2025, Hawke actually did manage to make it all work out, with three wildly different projects: The crafty horror hit sequel Black Phone 2, the acclaimed FX series The Lowdown and then Blue Moon, which has now earned Hawke his fifth Oscar nomination and his first as best actor.
Blue Moon reunites Hawke, 55, with director Richard Linklater, his longtime collaborator and fellow Texan (Hawke was born in Austin; Linklater in Houston), for the ninth time — but the first since 2014’s Boyhood, which, incidentally, was Hawke’s last Oscar nomination. (Linklater is “one of my best friends in the world,” Hawke tells me.)
Playing acclaimed and troubled Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, drinking and moping at Sardi’s on the night his former writing partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) opens the career-defining hit Oklahoma!, Hawke transforms himself in a way he says nobody but Linklater ever would have thought he could pull off.
“I felt absolutely sure I could do it until it got really close, and then I started thinking, ‘Isn’t there somebody else we could cast?’’ Hawke tells me. “By nature, I’m an enthusiast. If I had too many moments of doubt, I wouldn’t have done half the stupid shit I got up to with my life.”
Lucky for everyone who’s seen Blue Moon (released in theaters last year by Sony Pictures Classics and now streaming on Netflix), Hawke stuck with it, pulling off a performance that’s small but deceptively complicated. “It was a tightrope walk in that we needed to work harder than we’ve ever worked before,” Hawke continues. “Whenever you’re trying to do something simple, for it to be worth your time, it can have no mistakes. It’s a really, really simple portrait of a human being. And that’s what I’m proud of. I’m proud of putting something like that into the world.”
When I spoke to Hawke, he’d just returned from the Sundance Film Festival, where his new film The Weight premiered. It’s the same festival where some of his career-defining hits of the past, from 1994’s Reality Bites to Boyhood, also debuted. The vibes at Sundance this year were nostalgic and also a little sad, but Hawke tells me he walked away with newfound enthusiasm about the world of indie films, difficult as it can be.
“It’s such an interesting moment to be alive, and I find it absolutely terrifying with my kids on their phones all day long,” he admits. “I know books are gonna be written about this in the future, about what’s happening to our brains, and the level of malevolence in our contemporary dialogue is tough to handle, and the government feels scary and out of control. But it’s still us, you know? You’re constantly running into people who are doing their best.”
