{"id":773953,"date":"2026-09-17T20:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T20:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/773953\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T20:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T20:18:10","slug":"ethan-hawke-on-playing-a-new-kind-of-man-in-the-weight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/773953\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke on playing a new kind of man in The Weight"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Padraic McKinley\u2019s The Weight<\/a>, Ethan Hawke plays Murphy, a conflicted but righteous man who finds himself in dire straits during the Great Depression. Even in desperate times, he tries to do right by his little girl, but when he lands in prison far away from her, he must learn to survive the petty but deadly games the warden (Russell Crowe) and his men play with the prisoners\u2019 lives. While Hawke has lived many lives onscreen, his performance as Murphy stands out from the introspective wanderers like Jesse in the Before trilogy or the needy insecurity of Lorenz Hart, a Broadway composer whose star is falling, in Blue Moon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Murphy is the kind of tough-guy leading role that, while physically demanding, is also emotionally challenging, as Hawke must dig into his character\u2019s desperation and personal grief as he survives increasingly dangerous terrain on a mission to smuggle the warden\u2019s gold under the nose of the government. In an interview with The A.V. Club, Hawke traces The Weight\u2018s lineage back through literature and shares a little of what\u2019s next for him on his series The Lowdown<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The A.V. Club: The Weight is set a few years into the Great Depression, and that sense of desperation feels timely. Was that something you thought about when developing this character?<\/p>\n

Ethan Hawke: It was driving us. A story about how greed impresses itself on the populace, on the people, and how it pits them against each other when they\u2019re not realizing that they\u2019re stronger than the forces upon them if they work together. I love them arguing about Franklin Roosevelt or whatever, the details of their lives, and not realizing that their common humanity is so strong if they can find it. These people who think they don\u2019t like each other have so much in common and so much good to do if they can pull together and do it. I love Murphy because he\u2019s the kind of person I\u2019d like to be: a thoughtful person who doesn\u2019t lie, who meets their responsibility, who takes responsibility for others and himself. It\u2019s an old-fashioned kind of masculine prototype that I\u2019ve never gotten to play, and I don\u2019t get to see enough of in movies\u2014to play a man that I admire.<\/p>\n

\ufeff\ufeff<\/p>\n

AVC: What was it like sharing those scenes with Russell Crowe? They\u2019re some of the most tense in the movie.<\/p>\n

EH: This movie doesn\u2019t work without him. We needed a heavyweight champion to come in and box with, to be the formidable opponent for Murphy. It makes the movie so much stronger. He\u2019s one of the top dramatic actors of my generation, bar none. We\u2019re lucky to have him, and it\u2019s so easy to do scenes with a great actor. There\u2019s a new season of The Lowdown coming out, and I got to do these scenes with Tommy Lee Jones. When you get to work with these people at the top of my field, it\u2019s just thrilling.<\/p>\n

AVC: Speaking of intensity, there are a number of suspenseful moments that would fit right in with movies like The Wages Of Fear and Sorcerer. Were there other classic inspirations for The Weight?<\/p>\n

EH: We\u2019re all a bunch of cinephiles, so Wages Of Fear and Sorcerer are clearly inspirations for this movie, but so is Cool Hand Luke, so is Sometimes A Great Notion, Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. In this day and age that we\u2019re living in, we all grew up on the same movies. Even all those movies I referenced, they\u2019re pulling from great literature. There\u2019s a part of me that felt like it was a Rudyard Kipling short story or a Jack London short story or something where it\u2019s visceral, it\u2019s simple, it\u2019s very straightforward. It was kind of old-school, powerful storytelling\u2014a story of greed, of how a father can reunite with his daughter, how you can beat the system.<\/p>\n

AVC: You\u2019re also a director. What\u2019s it like to work with someone else to fine-tune your performance and how it shows up on camera?<\/p>\n

EH: I love working with a great director. My favorite position in life is getting to be a performer for a director who has a really strong vision and knows how to articulate it. It\u2019s a joy. This is Padraic\u2019s first film. It\u2019s a banger of a first film. I put it up against anybody\u2019s first film, but he\u2019s not a kid. He spent his life studying this profession. His father was an editor. [Padraic\u2019s] one of the best editors I\u2019ve ever seen, and it makes him a great leader. I always try to be the kind of actor that I would most want as a director. My favorite Brando quote is from his earlier days, but he said you have to spiritually marry your director\u2014you\u2019re an extension of their imagination. If you\u2019re trying to make a different movie than they are, the music can\u2019t harmonize. If you can really understand the movie they\u2019re trying to make and become the tip of the spear, so to speak, and deliver that to the audience, that\u2019s when acting can really pierce.<\/p>\n

AVC: Speaking of The Lowdown, Tulsa is so central to the show. How important is it to you and creator Sterlin Harjo to get a sense of the community there?<\/p>\n

EH: Place, setting, environment tells you so much about the people, and the people are so informed by the places we live in. One of the great gifts is that Padraic really sets The Weight in its place, in its time, in the feel of it. And Sterlin does the same thing with Tulsa and The Lowdown. The whole season one of The Lowdown ends with a big wide shot of Tulsa. I always think that it\u2019s perfect because Tulsa\u2019s really the main character. Lee is bouncing around the city and taking you to all these different places and all these different people and these different communities. He\u2019s a useful tool to do a portrait of Tulsa, and that\u2019s what the show continues to be.<\/p>\n

AVC: Can you tell us anything about Betty Gilpin and how her character will interact with Lee?<\/p>\n

EH: Well, we just have this phenomenal new cast, the two major new characters are [played by] Betty Gilpin and Tommy Lee Jones, and she\u2019s a firecracker. She\u2019s such an intelligent actress, and she\u2019s kind of amazing to work with because she\u2019s really funny, really smart, and really understands drama and storytelling. Her character\u2019s just as much a hot mess as Lee is. So hilarity should ensue, I hope.<\/p>\n

AVC: Returning for another season, it\u2019s kind of like you coming back to Jesse for the Before movies. What\u2019s it like to revisit a character versus creating something from scratch?<\/p>\n

EH: It\u2019s funny, I\u2019ve never done [an ongoing series]. You mentioned Jesse from the Before <\/a>trilogy<\/a>, but those movies had nine years in between them, so it kind of felt new again. The advantage of doing a TV show is it\u2019s a really big canvas and you really get comfortable inside the skin of the character. A lot of the fun for me is finding what he walks like, what he dresses like, what the world is. I missed that, that newness, that freshness, but the advantage is it\u2019s really lived in, and you can go deeper and you can really get to know the character. I hope season one really just feels like the prequel to the real movie that is season two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Padraic McKinley\u2019s The Weight, Ethan Hawke plays Murphy, a conflicted but righteous man who finds himself in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-773953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}