{"id":341781,"date":"2025-12-11T22:35:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T22:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/341781\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T22:35:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T22:35:10","slug":"ethan-hawke-wanted-to-be-a-boxer-until-his-first-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/341781\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke wanted to be a boxer … until his first fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ethan-hawke-cbs-sports-dec-11-2025.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n

Ethan Hawke wanted to be a real-life Rocky Balboa, but quickly realized the boxing ring wasn’t his forte.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Inspired by Sylvester Stallone’s iconic performance in the “Rocky” film franchise, Hawke briefly pursued a boxing career. After one fight, however, Hawke realized he wouldn’t cut it as a professional fighter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I saw ‘Rocky’ and I decided I wanted to be a boxer,” Hawke told<\/a> fellow actor Sydney Sweeney for Variety and CNN’s “Actors on Actors” series. “I took boxing lessons. I got one fight, and I didn’t like boxing anymore.<\/p>\n

“I got my ass kicked. I felt like I was a pretty good defensive boxer, but the guy was punching my hands so hard that I was hitting myself. I dropped it. I did not like losing.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hawke fared infinitely better as an actor. His decorated resume includes a Daytime Emmy Award, as well as nominations for four Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, a British Academy Film Award, and a Tony. He came closest to experiencing the boxer lifestyle while portraying an ex-boxer in a 1999 production of Tennessee Williams’ experimental play, “Camino Real.”<\/p>\n

Sweeney, who recently played International Boxing Hall of Famer Christy Martin in a biopic, told Hawke she had trained in boxing for roughly six months for the role.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“You fared better than I did,” Hawke told Sweeney, the latter of whom suffered a concussion on set.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getty Images Ethan Hawke wanted to be a real-life Rocky Balboa, but quickly realized the boxing ring wasn’t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,189726,189725,189727,85],"class_list":["post-341781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-ehtan-hawke-boxing","tag-ethan-hawke-movies","tag-ethan-hawke-sylvester-stallone-ethan-hawe-rocky-balboa","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}