The Many Faces of Ethan Hawke | the New Yorker
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Profiles September 21, 2020 Issue The Many Faces of Ethan Hawke The actor’s long, freewheeling career has been a chart of his restlessness and his recklessness. By John Lahr September 14, 2020 Hawke, at his home in Connecticut, in July. “If you want to live in the arts,” he said, “you’ve got to dig in.” Photograph by Nikola Tamindzic for The New Yorker 0"00 / 40"02 Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download Audm for iPhone or Android. n a chilly November morning last year, the sunlight a ribbon of gold on the rolling Virginia hills, Ethan Hawke, O who would turn forty-nine the next day, ambled into a replica of Harpers Ferry in 1859. An armory and four short streets had been constructed on the grounds of State Farm, a prison property outside Richmond. Hawke, already in full makeup and sporting a long, shaggy beard, was playing the !inty abolitionist John Brown, in “The Good Lord Bird,” a seven-part Showtime series adapted from James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award-winning novel. (The show, which premières October 4th, is the "rst project that Hawke has produced, co-created, with Mark Richard, and starred in.) For his next scene, he was preparing to reënact Brown’s famous raid on the United States arsenal. Brown was hanged for this botched act of terrorism—an attempt to arm slaves and start a revolt—but it proved to be a tipping point, eighteen months later, for the start of the Civil War. Hawke was at the end of a six-month shoot on the show, but his connection with Brown’s story had begun a few years earlier, in 2015, as he drove to the set of Antoine Fuqua’s remake of “The Magni"cent Seven,” near Baton Rouge. In that "lm, Hawke played a Confederate soldier who didn’t want to "ght anymore. In the scene he was shooting that day, a U.S. marshal (played by Denzel Washington) would say, “The war is over,” and Hawke’s character would reply, “It’s never over. It just keeps going on and on.” As Hawke ran through the scene in his mind, his car radio broadcast news of a legislative battle in South Carolina over the right to !y the Confederate !ag in front of the statehouse. It struck him that the Civil War was, indeed, not over, an insight that coincided with one of the directors of photography asking him if he’d read the novel “The Good Lord Bird.” Studying Hawke, with his piercing blue eyes, angular chin, and slicked-back brindle hair, the D.P. added, “Read the book—you’d make a great John Brown.” Hawke read the novel on set and couldn’t stop laughing. The picaresque saga, which is told more in the style of Redd Foxx than of Toni Morrison, addresses the barbarism of slavery through the faux-naïf eyes of Little Onion, a formerly enslaved boy disguised as a girl, who becomes witness to Brown’s rebellion. McBride’s impish tone is as incendiary as his subject, precisely because the humor highlights the surreal horror of slavery and the courage needed to survive it. Here is a Black American novelist writing about the nation’s greatest wound in an irreverent way that is “very dangerous in the current atmosphere,” Hawke said. On the other hand, he went on, “if you’re trying to teach people, or yell at them, you rarely change their mind. Humor can really effect change—it’s the greatest illuminator.” Hawke, in his book “Rules for a Knight” (2015)—written for the instruction of his children—styles himself as a medieval knight searching for the holy grail of higher being. “A knight does not stop at each victory,” he advises. “He pushes on to risk a more signi"cant failure.” John Brown similarly saw himself as a warrior for moral justice, and his righteous ideals make him a profoundly fascinating character for Hawke. “There is a mistaken idea that he was trying to save Black folks,” Hawke told me. “He was trying to save us. Seen through the eyes of a serious Christian, Black people didn’t need saving. The affluent white communities were the ones living in sin. Harpers Ferry was the great American trumpet sound.” He went on, “If people said, ‘Don’t you feel bad you got your own sons killed?,’ he’d say, ‘Someday, this country will be ashamed of slavery, and I’ll never be ashamed of my boys.’ I just loved that. I found it very inspiring. I don’t know how to wrestle with the violence of it, because I’m not a violent person. But I admire his ethics and his ferocity.” He added, “John Brown’s a lightning rod. He forces the question of violence versus nonviolence, like Malcolm X. That’s why we avoid talking about him. He fans the !ames of white guilt.” On the set in Virginia, Hawke ran through his lines, sitting on a barrel by the gates of the re-created Harpers Ferry engine house, where Brown’s ragtag army of eighteen held off about two hundred and forty militiamen and U.S. marines for thirty- six hours. Because McBride’s novel is narrated entirely by Onion, Hawke had to invent his own voice for Brown. Channelling the stentorian delivery of his Texan grandfather, a nabob of local politics who spoke in paragraphs, Hawke found both a sound and a subtext for Brown, who, he decided, was always in dialogue with his Maker. That morning, Hawke was working up a prayer that he planned to improvise on camera, as a way of circumventing studio interference—a technique he learned from watching Denzel Washington, when they co-starred in the 2001 "lm “Training Day.” “If they see the words in the script, they get scared and note you to death,” Hawke told me. “If you just improvise it, they think they are brilliant for hiring you.” As he rehearsed, he could see his breath. “Might we, Lord, as your humble servants, grab the beams of this engine house and pull slavery down on top of us? If so, Lord, grant me the strength of Samson,” he intoned. By the time he had the speech formed, a hundred or so extras had "led onto the set with guns and horses. It was time to go to work. He thought about the fact that he was the "rst person to put John Brown’s full story on "lm. As he told me later, “I couldn’t believe that this moment of American history had been relatively untouched in cinema and that my heroes hadn’t already played this part. Jason Robards? Chris Plummer? Orson Welles? How did Paul Newman not get this part? I felt like the luckiest actor in America.” awke’s mother’s family in Abilene, Texas—he was born in Austin—were Yellow Dog Democrats. His maternal H grandfather, Howard Green, co-owned and managed the Abilene Blue Sox, a farm club for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was one of the men who wanted to have Jackie Robinson on the team. Hawke’s mother, Leslie, whom he calls “a wannabe Eleanor Roosevelt,” juggled her work with social action, teaching at an inner-city school, joining the Peace Corps at forty-eight, and founding the Alex Fund, a charity that helps provide education for poor children in Romania. As a teen- ager, Hawke himself volunteered, under the auspices of the Episcopal Church, in Haiti, during the early days of the aids epidemic, and in Appalachia. When he was in high school, in Princeton, New Jersey, his mother took in two Ethiopian students; one of them, who went on to study computer science, was picked up by police for walking in Hawke’s suburban neighborhood. “That was a huge wake-up call for me,” Hawke said. “He got stopped by the cops constantly. I never did. I could have had a bag of marijuana in my pocket. All he ever had in his pocket was a calculator.” While shooting “Training Day,” Hawke spent four months riding around Watts, listening to Washington talk about race in America and about Malcolm X (whom Washington had played in Spike Lee’s 1992 bio-pic); for Hawke, it was “a powerful education.” When he and his wife, Ryan Shawhughes, met with McBride, in January, 2016, to discuss turning “The Good Lord Bird” into a limited series, McBride could tell that Hawke knew the territory. “There’s dynamics of this whole race question that we could burn a lot of ink talking about,” McBride told me. “Ultimately, that would have been a waste of time. Ethan really understood what John Brown represented.” Hawke told McBride, “I’m not Brad Pitt. I can’t afford to option this novel for the money that it deserves.” But they made a handshake deal that allowed Hawke a year to come up with an adaptation. If McBride liked the script, they’d look for someone to buy it. “Basically, he gave me permission to write it for free,” Hawke said. One afternoon in May, 2017, Hawke rode his bicycle from his town house in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, near the Red Hook housing projects, where McBride oversees the children’s music program. He was going to pick up McBride’s notes on a rough draft of his script. Hawke wandered into the vestibule of the church. “Are you the guy who’s come to "x the air-conditioning?” the church treasurer asked.