Ethan Hawke is sitting on a couch in a hotel room in Munich. His thick hair is slicked straight back, revealing a bit of silver along the sides. The actor, writer, and documentarian is freshly shaved, and maybe a bit disoriented. He’s in Germany to film The Weight, starring alongside Russell Crowe, a long-gestating project he’s wanted to make for years. It’s a historical drama set in 1930s Oregon, and after finishing the first week of principal photography somewhere in Bavaria, he settles in for our conversation and admits: “I’m just trying to pull myself together here,” as if Depression-era Pacific Northwest weather followed him and is still lingering somewhere in the room. 

We’re here to talk about two of his upcoming projects—his ninth film with friend and fellow Texan, Richard Linklater, called Blue Moon; and The Lowdown, the forthcoming limited series by Reservation Dogs co-creator and director Sterlin Harjo. In the former, Hawke pulls off a miraculous performance as Lorenz Hart, the lyricist and songwriting partner to Richard Rodgers, whose string of hits include the film’s namesake, along with “My Funny Valentine,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and “The Lady Is A Tramp.” In The Lowdown, Hawke plays a Tulsa “truthstorian” and citizen journalist, Lee Raybon, whose commitment to uprooting his community’s moral failings lands him in all kinds of trouble with the wrong people. 

Watching Hawke take full command of these characters—one a very real person with kaleidoscopic interiority (Hart); and, Raybon, the self-styled beatnik, bookshop-owning, dustbowl detective who wanders his way into ever-increasing danger in Harjo’s loose homage to Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye—it suddenly occurs to me that we have all been taking Ethan Hawke for granted. He’s made it easy, because he’s always around when you need him.

There he is, making his debut opposite River Phoenix in Explorers (1985), the film flop that nearly ended Hawke’s career before it began. A brief retirement from adolescent acting ended four years later with Hawke’s performance as the wide-eyed idealistic student to Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989), and no comprehensive list of films from the 1990s is complete without Hawke’s turn as the disaffected slacker Troy in Reality Bites (1994), where he talks Winona Ryder’s ear off in the kind of endless Gen X pontificating nobody (unfortunately) has the time for these days.

It was right square in the middle of that decade when Hawke began his lifelong, continuing collaboration with Richard Linklater. Before Sunrise (1995) was an unexpected arthouse hit and the first film in a trilogy that would eventually span two decades. Boyhood, much of it made at the same time as the Before Trilogy, was filmed over the course of 12 years, and earned Hawke an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In the long history of director-actor partnerships that span multiple films, there isn’t anything quite like what Linklater and Hawke have accomplished together. This is why it makes a peculiar kind of sense that Linklater has entrusted him to portray such an unlikely historical figure in Lorenz “Larry” Hart.

“Nobody else would have cast me in this movie,” Hawke says. “Rick sees something in me that other people don’t. One of the remarkable things about Rick is that he operates with a level of gratitude, with the understanding that the world does not owe us any of this. That became clear to me on Before Sunset. It’s not good enough that we enjoy each other and have a good time. We have to have something to say, something to contribute. We made Boyhood at the same time we were making Before Sunset and Before Midnight—it was such an event in both of our lives, and our friendship really deepened over that period. So, when we started shooting Blue Moon, it was clear that we were not going to be having some fun reunion party. He wanted to push me further than I’d ever been pushed before and that can put a lot of pressure on a friendship.”

As Hart, Hawke is unrecognizable. Balding, short, alcoholic, and possessed with a romantic yearning that animates his entire physical being in a way he has never expressed previously on screen, Blue Moon is the unlikeliest career peak from a pair of artists that shouldn’t be scaling such heights this far into a decades-long partnership. For Linklater, this is exactly why Hawke is perfectly cast, even if he didn’t think he was ready for the role when he first gave him the script over a decade ago. 

“It was a real dance,” says Linklater. “Ethan has never had to transform this much physically and mentally. That’s why I was a bit of a nag as a director. I mean, nobody ever wanted to sleep with Larry Hart, so Ethan had to disappear. We had 15 days to shoot and no money, but he’s built for that kind of a schedule. He wants to put himself in a position to completely fail and have his back up against the wall and this was a monster challenge for both of us. In that way, we were leaping off a cliff together. It wasn’t really about me lifting him up, even if he might see it that way. It’s always more collaborative when we’re working together.” 

Blue Moon is set almost entirely in Sardi’s restaurant, the Broadway mainstay where Hart goes to hold court before the arrival of the Oklahoma! afterparty. It’s the triumphant opening night for Rodgers’ first work in partnership with his new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. Finding the experience unbearable, Hart skips out of the performance early to lurk at the bar in Sardi’s, unsuccessfully attempting to quell the urge to betray his recent sobriety. As he awaits the arrival of his elusive muse (Margaret Qualley), who will presumably help him survive the evening’s unfolding dramas, his monologues spool out into the bar as he imposes himself on everyone in his path, telling tall tales and enduring strained toasts to a crowd in which he feels increasingly inadequate. Hawke’s miraculous disappearance behind yearning, glassy eyes, and trembling hands that can barely ignite half a cigar is unlike anything he’s done before. And Hawke is right. No one but Linklater could have made a film like this work with him as Hart.

“I knew nothing of Lorenz Hart when I first read the script,” admits Hawke. “But it’s an incredible piece of writing and I immediately knew this would be bliss. One of the exciting things about playing Hart—someone a lot of people don’t know that much about—there isn’t that pressure to kiss certain iconic rings. If we were dealing with Johnny Cash or Ray Charles, you have to compete with an iconography the audience already brings with them. So there was a lot of freedom in playing Hart. Then, the problem becomes a responsibility to the truth, and to Hart’s integrity, and to the people that do care about him.”

For Sterlin Harjo—the writer and director who first worked with Hawke on the series finale of the beloved FX show Reservation Dogs—it’s that fierce commitment to truth and getting to the core of a character, real or imagined, that convinced him to cast Hawke as Lee Raybon for his upcoming eight-episode limited series, The Lowdown.

“Weirdly, I always knew I would work with Ethan,” Harjo tells me from his office at Crazy Eagle Media, his production company in Tulsa. “I read his first book (The Hottest State) when I was young, and it felt like we spoke a similar language, like we were kindred. It’s amazing how long he has been working as an actor and yet he can still surprise you. He just brought so much life to the show. I didn’t know what to expect, and when he came in as this character, I was blown away.”

Harjo describes how he and Hawke would spend downtime on set, teaching each other Hank Williams and Tyler Childers songs on guitar. “That’s where kindred spirits meet,” says Harjo. “It’s through art, and that’s why we get along. Even if you look at him in Linklater’s Blue Moon, art is being celebrated in that film. Ethan’s passion is art and so are big questions like, ‘What are we put here to do?’ We’re here to inspire and create. That’s where our interests intersect and it really comes through in the show.”

In the pilot, Hawke’s Tulsa “truthstorian” Lee Raybon works in a rare bookstore, entangles himself in local politics, and writes for the kind of alt-weekly that can only exist nowadays if its cover is emblazoned with adverts for questionable hotlines and strip clubs. The stature of the publication doesn’t deter Raybon from using its local platform to uncover dark truths about some of the town’s most powerful and wealthy families, which, of course, raises the ire of still-unseen forces who try to derail him in both comical and violent ways. When Killer Mike appears in the first episode to deliver its most memorable line—“White men that care are the saddest of the bunch”—you can guess where The Lowdown will aim its laughs and the struggles its protagonist will face as the self-appointed savior, attempting to uncover the truth, wherever that truth might lead.

Hawke’s interest in the possibilities presented by the limited-series format began when he made his own adaptation of the James McBride novel, The Good Lord Bird, and learned that he didn’t have to condense the National Book Award-winning title into three chapters. And as the distinction between feature films and limited television series continue to blur in increasingly interesting ways, Hawke’s previous reluctance to participate in the format has abated accordingly.

“The really bad aspect of TV, for me, is when you can feel it doing the job of wasting your time successfully,” he admits. “You’re home from work, you have an hour before you have to make dinner, and you want to take your mind off of your problems and not actually have to engage in anything. Television is happy to waste an hour of your time for you. It’s like watching someone juggle, right? It’s fun. Juggling chainsaws is awesome, but it’s not in service to a larger idea. I’m not trying to be too erudite about it, but as an actor, I’m more interested in disappearing into a larger canvas, into a painting that has a point. Through my friendship with Sterlin and watching Reservation Dogs, I thought, ‘Well, fuck it.’ Whatever the word is, TV or movies, I felt the same buzz watching his show like when I’d watch a great indie film. Or when someone shows you [Godard’s] Masculin Féminin for the first time and you’re like, ‘What was that? I don’t know what it is, but I love it.’ Sterlin is a fully mature artist with something to say, so I was happy to play in that sandbox of his.”

Hawke has also steadily made a name for himself as a documentarian, most recently with his six-part HBO series, The Last Movie Stars, about the life, work, and marriage of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Perhaps more surprisingly, he’s currently at work on a documentary about country music legend Merle Haggard. When you hear him explain how he came to be interested in the task of telling the story of one of the most influential singer-songwriters in the history of country music, Hawke again shows how his perception of the world is most often shaped by the art that other people make. 

“I’ve made a few documentaries now, and they’re all about the lives of other artists,” he says. “So, clearly, I’m trying to learn something about people who have been able to contribute something of themselves over a long period of time.”

We speak briefly about Paul Newman’s activism in the 1960s, and whether Hawke feels a similar obligation to speak out now, especially when the political landscape has shifted so drastically (and so quickly) that the idea of making art can, at times, seem superfluous. As it turns out, this is precisely why he wanted to make a film about Haggard.

“When you’re making a documentary about a life, you have to find out why this individual’s story might have meaning beyond the individual,” Hawke says. “As an actor, I’m not interested in playing Merle Haggard. But I’m very interested in Merle now because of how politically divided the country is. I knew that no matter who won the last election, half of the country would be despondent. That sentiment has been growing through the course of my own lifetime, but it wasn’t as true when I was a young man. We’re at war with each other. So, I started to think about how Merle walked his own wild path of never being left or right. He didn’t fall into anyone else’s line. He was true. I really admire people who don’t fall in line, and people who think for themselves. So, I thought Merle might be a really wonderful artist to think about now, and how we might need to stop playing on opposing teams and start taking care of our own street corners, you know?”

With the light in his hotel suite growing more dim with the onset of evening, and the conversation somehow managing to taper off—if only because of the clock on the wall, and not for any waning interest in the multitude of subjects we’ve been juggling for the better part of an hour—it’s easy to see why Sterlin Harjo and Richard Linklater have decided to spend so much time working with him. Hawke is a true storyteller. If we are to survive our current political condition with our humanity intact, it will be through stories and the sacred space that exists between two artists working in secret rhythm, determined to tell them just right.

“We’re living in a weird moment,” Hawke says, after a pause, considering a question about art and its usefulness in a time when individual expression is being hoarded by technologists to populate their plagiarism machines. “It doesn’t give me despair. It doesn’t even give me pause. It’s never really about the words; it’s about the spirit behind the words. If there’s nothing happening internally, then it’s not even writing. In my mind, it’s quite simple. A machine can run a marathon faster than a human being. But the point isn’t how fast you can run 26.2 miles; the point is that you are doing it. Why climb a mountain? Why sing a song? Why stand on stage? Why are we even born? Why do we die? Whatever the answer is, it’s true for both of us. We’re here to be human.”

Photographed by Juankr

Styled by Izabela Macoch at Kathrin Hohberg Artists

Written by Gregg LaGambina

Grooming: Jochen Pahs at Nina Klein

Flaunt Film Editor: Daniel Quintero

Location: The Charles Hotel