Why Ethan Hawke Needed Shattered Confidence to Play Lorenz Hart in ‘Blue Moon’

Long before the period drama “Blue Moon” brought Ethan Hawke his fifth Academy Award nomination, the project was a script waiting for Hawke to get older. The waiting began in the early 2010s, after “Me and Orson Welles” writer Robert Kaplow mentioned to that film’s director, Richard Linklater, that he’d written a screenplay about songwriter Lorenz Hart on the opening night of the Broadway smash “Oklahoma!,” the first musical Hart’s longtime co-writer Richard Rodgers had made after replacing him with Oscar Hammerstein II.

“I just laughed,” Linklater said. “And I said, ‘That is the most perverse idea ever. I want to read this.’”

He did, he loved it and during the final year of filming the 2014 film “Boyhood,” he gave the script to his friend Hawke — not as a pitch but just as a way of saying, “Look at this crazy thing that Robert wrote!” The actor immediately told Linklater that he’d love to play Hart, a lonely and brilliant man, gay and closeted and balding and all of 5 feet tall, who was drinking himself out of a career even after writing some of the classics of the Great American Songbook.

Linklater said he was taken aback. “I was like, ‘Ethan, first off, you’re way too tall. You’re too good-looking. You’re not ready because, you know, someone might still want to sleep with you. No one ever wanted to sleep with Larry Hart.’”

But Hawke, as tall and good-looking as he might be, identified with the man who would be dead from pneumonia seven months after the night depicted in the film.

“I wanted to do it so badly,” he said. “It’s hard to articulate why, but the first time I read it, I felt I understood him and I laughed myself silly. I’m a person who is wildly in love with the theater, and at its core it’s a love letter to Broadway legends. And it’s also, even in its smallness, an epic howl into the night of an artist left behind.

“I think anybody who’s dedicated their life to the arts knows the feeling of indifference and how cold it is, and can relate to Larry. I certainly did.”

Over the next decade, the two men would help Kaplow tinker with the script, occasionally holding private readings as Linklater waited for Hawke to get enough wear and tear in his face and body to believably play a man with no sex appeal. Then Linklater saw his friend on “The Tonight Show” one night.

“He makes a joke that I called him up and said, ‘Hey, I saw you on Fallon,’” Linklater said. “‘Good news and bad news, Ethan! The good news, we’re making it. The bad news…’”

Hawke, now 55, reluctantly conceded that Linklater may have had a point.

“I didn’t think I needed to age into it, but Rick did,” he said. “Rick knew that time was only gonna help me. And funnily enough, it’s not just aging, not just your face cracking and falling apart. I thought I was ready when I was 40, but I wasn’t. And Rick understands. With ‘Born to Be Blue’ and ‘The Good Lord Bird’ and ‘First Reformed’ and a lot of pieces, I got more and more interested in what people call character acting. And this part required all of it, everything I’ve learned over 30 some-odd years.”

“Blue Moon” wasn’t an easy experience for Hawke, who sums it up as “exciting and exhausting.” But he can’t say he wasn’t warned.

“We’ve been approaching this as storytellers,” Linklater told him when the film got enough financing from Sony Pictures Classics to allow for a 15-day shoot on a stage in Dublin. “But now you have to approach it completely as Larry Hart. And you’re in for a world of hurt.”

Hawke may have described the length of his career as “30 some-odd years” in a conversation from his Brooklyn home just after he arrived there from Sundance, but it’s actually been more like 40 years. The actor was cast alongside the late River Phoenix in Joe Dante’s “Explorers” at the age of 14 and broke through four years later in “Dead Poets Society.” He starred in indie hits like “Reality Bites” and Linklater’s “Before” trilogy, earning Oscar nominations for co-writing “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight” and for his supporting roles in “Training Day” and “Boyhood.” (“Blue Moon” is his first Best Actor nomination.)

In his 20s, he had a leading man’s gleam and a magnetic energy, but he also felt somehow more grounded and earthy than many of his peers; that quality increased as he grew older, and it has been on full display in the remarkable work he’s done over the past decade, including Paul Schrader’s shattering “First Reformed,” the epic historical drama “The Northman” and the 2026 Sundance hit “The Weight,” as well as in the TV series “The Good Lord Bird” and “The Lowdown.”

“He was a handsome young man, but he had no vanity,” Linklater said. “Ethan couldn’t wait to get older and look like Kris Kristofferson. He’s the opposite of some actors who try to hold on to their youth. Ethan couldn’t wait to be a grizzly old guy, because that’s who he was inside all along. His physicality now matches the soul that was always there.”

But that physicality wasn’t necessarily warranted for Larry Hart. The songwriter responsible for the lyrics to classics like “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” was a tortured would-be sophisticate, a man who moved away from dense and complex lyrics only when the market (or the man writing the paycheck) demanded the simplicity of “Blue Moon,” the success of which he endured like an albatross around his neck.

“Blue Moon” is set entirely inside Sardi’s, the fabled Broadway bar and restaurant where Hart fled during “Oklahoma!”’s intermission to wait for the painfully inevitable post-show victory party.

“We knew the target would be very small, meaning that it would be a very difficult movie to make,” Hawke said. “It was going to be hard to make a movie in real time in one restaurant about a sad, lonely guy.”

It would also be hard to take about a foot off Hawke’s height, which Linklater was determined to do entirely through an array of practical effects.

“The history of cinema has made a lot of tiny men look huge and powerful,” Hawke said with a grin. “Why couldn’t it do the inverse?”

But they tried not to worry too much about the channels in the floor for Hawke to stand in, or the platforms used to make 5-foot, 9-inch actor Simon Delaney look more like the 6-foot, 3-inch Oscar Hammerstein II. Instead, they took their cues from the work of their lead characters.

“Rick and I had this idea that the whole movie should feel like a Rodgers and Hart song,” Hawke said. “It should be silly and melancholy and mercurial, and at the same time have moments of profundity like their music does. In a lot of ways, Rick’s job was to play Richard Rodgers and provide the architecture and the musculature for the film, and my job was to be Larry and dance all over it with the lyrics.”

But he couldn’t dance too gracefully or powerfully — because Linklater wanted Hart to be a shell of a man, and he wanted Hawke to throw away all of his usual mannerisms.

“I thought we were focused on working on the script, and I slowly realized that Rick was working on me,” Hawke said. “There was a level of confidence that Larry doesn’t have. Rick started calling it a process of deduction. Normally what you’re doing when you’re playing a character is adding attitude and swagger through the process of rehearsal. But he wanted everything to be as simple as possible, and for me to dedicate myself to not performing, not trying to entertain. He basically just reined me in.”

He laughed. “And then once everything was gone, once my confidence was shattered, we could start building him back up again.”

Rick and I both felt on this movie that we were coming up against the wall of our talent, but what was fun is that we were in new terrain.

Ethan Hawke

To get Hawke to that point, though, Linklater said he had to take a different approach as a director, to nag and pick at his friend rather than offer support. If they hadn’t already made eight movies together and been close friends, he figures his leading man would have punched him eventually.

“I was like, ‘We need you reduced to nothing: You’re a mouth, a brain and a yearning soul. That’s all you are.’ It’s like asking a ballplayer to not run as fast or not be as coordinated. Why wouldn’t you want to use all your charm and everything that’s gotten you here? It is a tall order, and some actors probably wouldn’t be interested. But Ethan just took on this challenge. It was exhilarating to see my friend work so hard.”

Then again, Hawke was used to a high degree of difficulty in collaborations with Linklater, who made “Boyhood” every summer for 12 years and created the “Before” trilogy out of two people wandering around having conversations.

“If you lean on friendship in a bad way, you’re making ‘Cannonball Run 6’ and you’re just enjoying your time together but not thinking about the audience,” Hawke said. “But if you use your friendship in a positive way, which is to push each other to go further than you thought possible because you’re in a safe place, you can do it. Rick and I both felt on this movie that we were coming up against the wall of our talent, but what was fun is that we were in new terrain.”

Linklater had been talking about Hawke for a while when he paused.

“This will tell you all you need to know about Ethan, in a way,” he said. “After River passed away, Ethan was kind of the number-one actor in his age group, which is a very commercial age group. He was a good-looking 23-year-old, a leading man-ish sort of guy. So he was getting offered everything.

“And I was casting ‘Before Sunrise,’ this wordy movie where nothing happens, where you’re walking around one night falling in love with someone. The script was kind of odd, the movie was happening, but there was no money.

“And there was Ethan. I saw him in a play in New York, and we talked backstage. It was his theater company and he was talking about Sam Shepard, and he amazed me so much. I thought he’d be perfect for my movie — but the telling thing is, why would an agent or anybody let him do that movie? He turned down a ton of money for other things to go make a movie that even he thought wouldn’t work.”

A laugh. “He was like, ‘How are we gonna pull this movie off?’ He was risking a huge failure if we didn’t work really hard and crack this thing, you know?

“Right then, that told me, Holy shit, this guy’s an artist. This guy’s not a careerist. This guy’s not thinking, OK, what’s my next move in Hollywood? He’s with me in Vienna working for no money on a film he thinks will be really, really hard to pull off. And I remember at some point he told me he had written a novel that was gonna be published. I was like, ‘You’re one of the bigger names of your generation as an actor. You’ve got the number-one music video (Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” which Hawke directed). You have your own theater company. You’ve been on Broadway already, and you’ve written a novel. Dude, everyone’s gonna hate you!’”

And yes, there may have been some resentment back then — but with his fifth Oscar nomination, a new season of “The Lowdown” in the works and raves for “The Weight,” Hawke has moved into what seems to be the richest and deepest portion of his career.

He calls working with Sterlin Harjo on “The Lowdown,” in which he plays a run-down bookstore owner and investigative journalist uncovering corruption in Tulsa, “one of the best experiences of my life,” and then considers a career full of lessons learned from directors including Linklater and Peter Weir, musicians like Texas troubadours Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley (about whom he directed the film “Blaze”) and playwrights over the centuries.

“There’s a line I say to myself: One lifetime is not enough to learn from this profession,” he said. “It really isn’t. Over the years, I have absolutely loved doing Sam Shepard plays. And then you see that inside Shepard plays are Tennessee Williams and Beckett, and inside them Chekhov and Shakespeare. And I keep having these experiences that reveal to me how little I know. That is one of the fun things about this life: No sooner do you learn something than it introduces you to something you don’t know.

“When I was 21, I was so confident. I think young people have to be. If you really took in all the things you don’t know, you couldn’t operate. You have to pretend that you know what you’re doing, and then slowly you gain some experience. And from that experience, you actually do get an education.”

The dog that’s been sitting next to Hawke during some of the conversation jumps down because it’s time for a walk, and he picks up the thought.

“I’ve found that in the last few years, I’ve been enjoying acting more than ever. I should also say that I’ve had really interesting parts. Sometimes when you’re a young man, you get asked to play really callow young people. And as you get older, you get to play more complicated, more experienced, more nuanced human beings, because time does that to us all by itself.”

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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