It's no more Mr Nice Guy for Ethan Hawke in a new heist movie by an old hand. Helen Barlow reports
KEY POINTS:
Ethan Hawke may have appeared in some 36 films after his breakthrough performance as a 19-year-old in Dead Poets' Society, but he's still a new kid compared with the director of his latest film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.
It is the 44th feature for 83-year-old Sidney Lumet, the director of such 50s, 60s and 70s classics as 12 Angry Men, Network and Dog Day Afternoon.
But it was enough for the 37-year-old Hawke and his co-stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney, to keep up with Lumet's on-set pace.
"Sidney shoots fast, and his material is dark and angry," says Hawke. "Sometimes, people try to make that sort of material cool but I'm not interested in that.
"I knew he wouldn't do that. He's a director who loves actors and allows them to do what they do."
While still retaining his boyish face, Hawke has an increasing amount of character lines, which he manages to screw up intensely in the film.
As Hawke plays fidgety Hank, a devoted father who's behind in his alimony payments. When his big brother, Andy (Seymour-Hoffman), a real estate broker with a heroin habit and a trophy wife (Tomei), hatches a ludicrous plan to rob their parents' jewellery store, he is easily convinced that their parents will come to no harm. Naturally, the heist goes awry, and their father (Finney), unaware that his sons are the culprits, goes after them.
Hawke, usually the nice guy on screen, says Hank is the most unlikeable character he has played.
"It's hard to play somebody who hates himself that much and that was the challenge. Hank loves his brother and does the robbery to seek his brother's approval, but he has sought his approval so much over the years that he has begun to hate him. He's even sleeping with his wife in retaliation. That's how a lot of weak people work. They seek revenge by sleeping with their wife or screwing up the robbery or whatever."
Hawke is somebody who cannot sit still - he always seems to have a project on the go. Whether writing books, treading the boards or directing movies, he's not the type to kick back on the couch.
He threw himself into his acting more than ever following his split from actress Uma Thurman, with whom he has two children.
In fact, he looked like haggard Hank for a while. "I was getting divorced and I weighed 130 pounds, but I weigh about 180 pounds now," he explains with a contented smile. "I was really unhappy."
Now that he is ensconced in a new relationship with former nanny Ryan Shawhughes and has a baby on the way, he seems rejuvenated.
Family is a priority for the actor, who even wrote a book about his tough early life, The Hottest State, which he turned into a film (still unreleased here). He admits it was his way of dealing with the absence of his own father.
"Since then I've been able to go forward and dealing with fatherhood has helped," he says. "I think one of the things that keeps a divorced father from being a good father is the guilt of failing your children's mother or failing the relationship. I didn't know that until it happened to me."
Hawke rose to fame early and he says it wasn't easy to deal with.
"I think I worried a lot about it when I was younger but time takes care of a lot of things. When you become a celebrity at a young age, it feels a lot like you're being made fun of or mocked. It feels good to be older."
Hawke's involvement in the theatre has brought him a new kind of family and, in his 20s, he created his own New York company, Malaparte, along with best friend Frank Whaley and his Dead Poets' co-star, Robert Sean Leonard.
He has also collaborated closely with film writer/director Richard Linklater and actress Julie Delpy on Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, for which the trio received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Hawke continues to work with Linklater in a continuing role in Boyhood, which chronicles the growing up of a child and will be completed in 2013,
So will there be a continuation of the story of Hawke's lovable Jesse and Delpy's feisty Celine?
"Our dream is to make five of those films, to have a magnum opus on romantic love in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s ... We see each other all time and are waiting for the right idea. We had such a success with Before Sunset that it stunted us a little bit. We didn't think that anybody cared at all about the first movie so it was a big surprise and it added a new pressure.
"I think we've played out the real time thing, so we need to do something else.
"In the end if we're going to make a magnum opus about love we also need to deal with erotica. In both of those movies, you never really see them kiss and we kind of want to do a Last Tango in Paris kind of movie."
Hawke might have to put on a few more pounds yet.
LOWDOWN
Who: Ethan Hawke.
Born: November 6, 1970, Austin, Texas.
Key Roles: Dead Poets' Society (1989), Alive (1993), Reality Bites (1994), Before Sunrise (1995), Gattaca (1997), Great Expectations (1998), The Newton Boys (1998), Hamlet (2000), Training Day (2001), Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), Lord of War (2005), Fast Food Nation (2006).
Latest: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead opens Thursday. Sneak previews this weekend
