{"id":122812,"date":"2025-08-31T12:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T12:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/122812\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T12:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T12:20:08","slug":"ethan-hawke-on-blue-moon-interview-on-playing-lorenz-hart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/122812\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke on ‘Blue Moon’ Interview: On Playing Lorenz Hart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ethan Hawke wears many hats. The multi-hyphenate writer-director-actor returns to the Telluride<\/a> Film<\/a> Festival for a Tribute with Berlin prize-winner \u201cBlue Moon<\/a>\u201d (SPC), in which he plays Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. And Hawke is debuting his new documentary \u201cHighway 99: A Double Album<\/a>,\u201d a two-parter devoted to the life and music of Merle Haggard, which will likely sell to a streamer as it hits the festival circuit. And showing at the Toronto International Film Festival is a new series debuting on FX September 23, \u201cThe Lowdown<\/a>.\u201d After all his recent efforts, Hawke, who has four Oscar nominations (three for collaborating with Richard Linklater), is ready to just talk. \u201cI\u2019m exhausted,\u201d he said over breakfast in Telluride.<\/p>\n

\"4238_D045_00238_R<\/a> \"Ask<\/a> <\/p>\n

Hawke has always loved music, and has learned a lot over the years from playing trumpeter Chet Baker (\u201cBorn to Be Blue\u201d) and directing the music movies \u201cBlaze\u201d and \u201cSeymour: An Introduction.\u201d That one debuted at Telluride in 2014. \u201cSeymour was my midlife crisis, right?\u201d said Hawke. \u201cIt\u2019s an old Shaker expression, but to master a craft, you have to apprentice three that surround it. My real mission is performance. That\u2019s what I\u2019ve done my whole life. That\u2019s where the rubber meets the road. But learning about directing, learning about writing, learning about music, learning about these other things helps. It\u2019s all connected.\u201d<\/p>\n

His two Telluride movies are united in that they\u2019re both about songwriters, \u201ctwo of the greatest American songwriters in the history of America,\u201d he said. Lorenz Hart had partnered with Richard Rodgers on such American songbook faves as \u201cBlue Moon\u201d and \u201cMy Funny Valentine.\u201d Hawke\u2019s love for Merle Haggard was embedded from his youth. \u201cFor most of us, the music that our parents played is somewhere deep inside us forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AUSTIN,Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke in 2022.Getty Images for Netflix<\/p>\n

His dive into Haggard follows \u201cThe Last Movie Stars,\u201d about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, \u201cmy love letter to my own profession,\u201d he said. \u201cIn thinking about what to do next, I love making documentaries, because it\u2019s something you can work on slowly. When I was younger, I used to try to write prose, and I wrote some books because I needed a job to sustain the imbalance of an actor\u2019s life. In the last few years, documentary has replaced that part of my life. Before I work on Larry Hart, I\u2019m working on Merle Haggard. Then I take a break. I disappear for 8-10, weeks. I play Larry Hart, and then I come back into me again, and I\u2019m talking about my childhood and my loves and things that are personal to me, and it helps keep me balanced.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHighway 99\u201d is Hawke\u2019s love letter to music. \u201cI knew that whoever won the election, half the country was going to be despondent. Merle Haggard always wrote about people. He continued his whole life to never write from a left wing or right wing point of view, but from a humanist point of view. Country music is a place where men can express their feelings, where they often struggle, and it\u2019s a really safe place to talk about what\u2019s going on inside you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two-part documentary digs into, among other things, the unrequited love story between Merle and Dolly Parton. And Hawke got to recruit some of his favorite singers to interpret Haggard\u2019s songs. He asked them which songs they wanted to sing, and Nora Jones, Valerie June, Steve Rowe and others picked them. \u201cI thought I could tell his life as a musical,\u201d said Hawke. \u201cI could use his own writing to tell his own story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cThe Last Movie Stars\u201d<\/p>\n

When it came to his ninth collaboration with Richard Linklater, \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d Hawke\u2019s music movies helped him to prepare for Larry Hart. \u201cThings like studying jazz for Chet Baker, studying the piano with \u2018Seymour,’\u201d he said, \u201cstudying the pain of trying to be a songwriter through \u2018Blaze.’\u201d<\/p>\n

The pain of Lorenz Hart comes through in this achingly sad story set at the end of Hart\u2019s partnership with Rodgers (Andrew Scott). It all takes place at Sardi\u2019s on the opening night of \u201cOklahoma!\u201d \u2014 which Rodgers composed with Oscar Hammerstein II instead of Hart, sealing their split. \u201cIf you are feeling a lot of pain,\u201d said Hawke, \u201cthere\u2019s this idea that success or approval from others is going to quiet that pain or bandage it. But in the history of mankind, it never does. He\u2019s heartbroken about Rodgers. He\u2019s setting himself up, and he\u2019s distracting himself that he\u2019s in love with this young woman [Margaret Qualley], and he\u2019s not even heterosexual. But he can\u2019t deal with the real pain that\u2019s happening. He can\u2019t look at it for a second. That movie is about a man who died of heartbreak. The alcohol was part of his sadness, the pain was too great to suffer without it. Alcohol is a painkiller.\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie starts out with Hart walking out of \u201cOklahoma!\u201d and ponying up to the bar at Sardi\u2019s, where the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) tries to keep his drinking under control. Hart is a great talker, the words flow out of him like butter. Hawke has to sustain the rhythm and cadence of long speeches. And theater vet Cannavale, who had bonded with Hawke on \u201cHurly Burly\u201d when they were both going through divorces, was there for him on \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d running lines. \u201cHe was my de facto acting coach,\u201d said Hawke. <\/p>\n

\"Ethan<\/p>\n

Hawke was a \u201cmonk\u201d during production, he said. \u201cI would just sit in my dressing room and listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing Rodgers & Hart songs over and over again. If you listen to the music, you start to realize how well the script is written, because the script functions like a Larry Hart song. It\u2019s so funny and absolutely heartbreaking and poignant and witty and irreverent and lewd. So I started looking at that first monologue as the lyrics to the song. Rick [Linklater] was going to be Rodgers. Rick was going to write the music and build it and make sure it was sculpted right, and make sure it was presented right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nailing this performance was about words. \u201cThis guy doesn\u2019t walk and talk like me, so it\u2019s voice and speech,\u201d said Hawke. \u201cHe speaks in complete sentences. He speaks with clear ideas. It always has to be the perfect word choice. It had to have the language.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was also movement and body language. Hart was short, with a hideous combover. \u201cI grew my hair really long and then shaved the middle so that I could do the combover,\u201d said Hawke, who is just under six feet. \u201cA combover is about the most unflattering look that men have ever come up with. So what happens immediately is your own self-esteem drops, because everybody starts looking at you, talking to you differently. We did all these old school stagecraft tricks to make me smaller.\u201d <\/p>\n

They built a trench in the floor and he bent his legs inside wide pants. \u201cWhen you do a scene with Margaret Qualley when you\u2019re a foot shorter than her, is different than being two inches taller than her, because she doesn\u2019t take it seriously.\u201d <\/p>\n

Luckily, Hawke had a decade to get used to the movie. Linklater gave it to him when he was in his early 40s and said, \u201cwhen you\u2019re old enough, we\u2019re going do it.\u201d They\u2019d get together every couple of years and do a reading of the screenplay, Hawke said, \u201cand we\u2019d prune it and tweak it and talk about it.\u201d <\/p>\n

The actor didn\u2019t feel any anxiety about it until just before shooting in Ireland. \u201cThen I realized that this movie was going to put Rick and me up against the wall of our talent,\u201d he said. \u201cThe bullseye in this movie is so small. There\u2019s so many ways to go wrong. One room, real time. Larry Hart is dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, the movie was filmed fast. \u201cRick had to be incredibly decisive and clear,\u201d said Hawke. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a big budget, no budget, but luckily, we didn\u2019t need one. We needed ideas and great actors. I knew if the guy playing Rodgers wasn\u2019t phenomenal, the movie wouldn\u2019t work. That was the biggest challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

In just a few quick scenes during the after party, the movie establishes the relationship between these former partners who are both grieving the breakup. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain Lennon-McCartney to Rodgers and Hart,\u201d said Hawke. \u201cFor these two people who are that creative together for that long. It\u2019s a high level of intimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But Rodgers is moving forward, while Hart is descending into alcohol. Hawke had long admired Scott, who also comes from theater. Qualley does not, but they all rehearsed the hell out of it and it all came together.<\/p>\n

Next up: Sterlin Harjo\u2019s FX series \u201cThe Lowdown,\u201d in which Hawke plays a renegade truth-teller. \u201cI got to have this character built for me by this brilliant young man,\u201d said Hawke. \u201cAnd I had so much fun.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke wears many hats. The multi-hyphenate writer-director-actor returns to the Telluride Film Festival for a Tribute with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45706,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[10546,19339,236,88,11337,2695,78581,5450,29506,76905,76721],"class_list":{"0":"post-122812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-blue-moon","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-festivals","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-highway-99-a-double-album","15":"tag-interviews","16":"tag-oscars","17":"tag-telluride","18":"tag-the-lowdown"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}