{"id":336408,"date":"2025-12-08T05:58:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T05:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/336408\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T05:58:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T05:58:10","slug":"ethan-hawke-remembers-dead-poets-society-co-star-robin-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/336408\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke Remembers ‘Dead Poets Society’ Co-Star Robin Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEthan Hawke<\/a> recalled being cognizant of Dead Poets Society<\/a> co-star Robin Williams<\/a>\u2018 mental health struggles, saying the actor\u2019s \u201cend of his life does not define his life to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn an extended interview with CBS Sunday Morning\u2018s Tracy Smith<\/a>, the Reality Bites star was asked if his viewing of the inimitable 1989 Peter Weir-directed boarding school drama has changed since Williams\u2019 death by suicide at the age of 63 in 2014<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt does not fundamentally change the way I watch the movie because, even at 18, I was aware of the complexity of his emotional life,\u201d Hawke said. \u201cI\u2019ve had a lot of depression in my family, and it was obvious to me that all that power and that charisma came at a certain cost. [He was] a deeply, deeply sensitive person, who was highly attuned to the energy of a room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe four-time Oscar-nominated actor remembered one particular, stark experience that contextualized the difference between Williams\u2019 public persona and his interior life.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI remember, once, he was making up lines, and everybody\u2019s laughing and everybody\u2019s praising him, and I went to get a glass of water, get a bagel or something, and I saw him hiding in a little corner, just hiding in the dark, by himself,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd I [go], \u2018Oh, OK.\u2019 It makes a lot more sense to me now, actually. It was a lot; it was taxing. There\u2019s a lot of stories about clowns and the happiness that they give and at what cost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Before Sunrise star concluded, \u201cSo, I say all that to say, the end of his life does not define his life to me. When I watch the movie, I think of the spirit of the man that I knew on those days and how powerful it was and how much he weathered that storm of his own psyche for us and for other people. I admire him tremendously. There aren\u2019t two of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWritten by Tom Schuman, the Academy Award-winning coming-of-age classic follows free-spirited teacher John Keating (Williams, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar) upon his 1959 return to a prestigious all-boys preparatory school in New England, whose nonconformist approach to the instruction of poetry inspires his students to explore self-discovery.<\/p>\n

\n\tHawke is currently making the awards rounds<\/a> for his turn in Richard Linklater\u2019s Blue Moon, his ninth collaboration with the auteur, which follows the opening night of 1943 musical\u00a0Oklahoma! and marked an inflection point between duo Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Lorenz \u201cLarry\u201d Hart (Hawke), as the former embarks on a new professional chapter with collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ethan Hawke recalled being cognizant of Dead Poets Society co-star Robin Williams\u2018 mental health struggles, saying the actor\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[140198,88,36127,206,62477],"class_list":{"0":"post-336408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-dead-poets-society","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ethan-hawke","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-robin-williams"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336408","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=336408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}