I remember him talking about Bright Lights Big City and joking about doing coke in the bathroom. Then he recognized the maître d’ as an old high school friend of his daughter. We talked in that conversation, as we do in this one, about what it was like to be a generational icon in the ’90s, and what it’s like to be that same icon now, at 55.
I know I am not alone when I say my sensibility was probably shaped by the characters he played and the attitude he embodied in films like Reality Bites and Before Sunset. Hawke isn’t actually those guys. But he still carries within him a rebel spirit, a distaste for fakeness and insincerity that I admire and relate to.
Those attitudes are on display, in different ways, in his two most recent projects: The Weight, an old-school adventure film with Russell Crowe that came out last month, and the second season of The Lowdown, the very fun Sterlin Harjo-created series about a bookstore owner who keeps getting mixed up in various crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last year, he was nominated for his fifth Oscar for his performance in Blue Moon, the beautifully rendered Richard Linklater film about the melancholy final days of Lorenz Hart, of the once-great duo Rogers and Hart. Hawke has been doing this a long time now, but he still clearly relishes the work.
Watch below or on YouTube. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The first time we met was in 2018, and in the time since I last saw you, you’ve shot approximately 20 films, five or six seasons of television, and written a novel.
What accounts for that pace? I’ll probably say something really corny—there’s a line, it could be credited to Thoreau, but a line about if you do what you love, you don’t work a day in your life. And I’ve had an interesting ride in this life where I’ve really gotten to do things that I really want to do, and that gives me a lot of energy.
And that’s the positive way of saying it. And the negative way of saying it would be that I’m a little restless and uncomfortable and doing things makes me feel better. When you say “uncomfortable,” what do you mean?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
