76 Facts About Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke has been nominated for numerous accolades including four Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award.

Ethan Hawke has written three novels and one graphic novel.

Ethan Hawke made his film debut in Explorers, before making a breakthrough performance in Dead Poets Society.

Ethan Hawke starred alongside Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight.

Ethan Hawke has received four Academy Award nominations, two for Best Supporting Actor for Training Day and Boyhood and the other two for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing Before Sunset and Before Midnight with Linklater and Delpy.

Ethan Hawke directed the narrative films Chelsea Walls, The Hottest State, and Blaze as well as the documentary Seymour: An Introduction.

Ethan Hawke created, co-wrote and starred as John Brown in the Showtime limited series The Good Lord Bird, and directed the HBO Max documentary series The Last Movie Stars.

Ethan Hawke starred in the Marvel television miniseries Moon Knight as Arthur Harrow.

Ethan Hawke made his Broadway debut in 1992 in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2007 for his performance in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia.

In 2010, Ethan Hawke directed Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Director of a Play.

Ethan Hawke was born on November 6,1970 in Austin, Texas, to Leslie, a charity worker, and James Ethan Hawke, an insurance actuary.

Ethan Hawke's parents were high school sweethearts in Fort Worth, Texas, and married young, when Ethan Hawke's mother was 17.

Ethan Hawke's parents were both students at the University of Texas at Austin at the time of his birth.

Ethan Hawke's mother remarried when he was 10 and the family moved to West Windsor Township, New Jersey.

Ethan Hawke later transferred to the Hun School of Princeton, a secondary boarding school, from which he graduated in 1988.

In high school, Ethan Hawke aspired to be a writer, but developed an interest in acting.

Ethan Hawke made his stage debut at age 13, in a production at The McCarter Theatre of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.

Ethan Hawke performed in West Windsor-Plainsboro High School productions of Meet Me in St Louis and You Can't Take It with You.

Ethan Hawke enrolled in New York University's English program for two years, but dropped out to pursue other acting roles.

Ethan Hawke obtained his mother's permission to attend his first casting call at the age of 14, and secured his first film role in Joe Dante's Explorers, in which he played an alien-obsessed schoolboy alongside River Phoenix.

In 1989, Ethan Hawke made his breakthrough appearance in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society, playing one of the students taught by Robin Williams as a charismatic English teacher.

Ethan Hawke later described the opportunities he was offered as a result of the film's success as critical to his decision to continue acting:.

Ethan Hawke makes Jack's passion for White Fang real and keeps it from being ridiculous or overly sentimental.

Away from acting, Ethan Hawke directed the music video for the 1994 song "Stay ", by singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb, who was a member of Ethan Hawke's theater company at the time.

Ethan Hawke published his first novel in 1996, The Hottest State, about a love affair between a young actor and a singer.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reviewer wrote that "Ethan Hawke, building on the sympathetic-but-edgy presence that has served him well since his kid-actor days, is most impressive".

In 1998, Ethan Hawke appeared alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro in Great Expectations, a contemporary film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel of the same name, directed by Alfonso Cuaron.

The film transposed the famous William Shakespeare play to contemporary New York City, a technique Ethan Hawke felt made the play more "accessible and vital".

Ethan Hawke regarded Tape as his "first adult performance", a performance commended by Ebert for showing "both physical and verbal acting mastery".

Ethan Hawke played rookie cop Jake Hoyt, alongside Denzel Washington, as one of a pair of narcotics detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department spending 24 hours in the gang neighborhoods of South Los Angeles.

Ethan Hawke himself described Training Day as his "best experience in Hollywood".

Ethan Hawke's performance earned him Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

Ethan Hawke pursued a number of projects away from acting throughout the early 2000s.

Ethan Hawke made his directorial debut with Chelsea Walls, an independent drama about five struggling artists living in the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City.

In 2003, Ethan Hawke made a television appearance, guest starring in the second season of the television series Alias, where he portrayed a mysterious CIA agent.

In 2004, Ethan Hawke returned to film, starring in two features, Taking Lives and Before Sunset.

Ethan Hawke starred in the 2005 action thriller Assault on Precinct 13, a loose remake of John Carpenter's 1976 film of the same title, with an updated plot.

Ethan Hawke appeared that year in the political crime thriller Lord of War, playing an Interpol agent chasing an arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage.

In 2006, Ethan Hawke was cast in a supporting role in Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater based on Eric Schlosser's best-selling 2001 book.

In 2007, Ethan Hawke starred alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, and Albert Finney in the crime drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised Ethan Hawke's performance, noting that he "digs deep to create a haunting portrayal of loss".

In 2009, Ethan Hawke appeared in two features: New York, I Love You, a romance movie comprising 12 short films, and Staten Island, a crime drama co-starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Seymour Cassel.

In 2010, Ethan Hawke starred as a vampire hematologist in the science fiction horror film Daybreakers.

Ethan Hawke then starred in the horror-thriller The Purge, about an American future where crime is legal for one night of the year.

Ethan Hawke said in an interview that the attention was a surprise to him.

Ethan Hawke next worked with the Spierig brothers again on the science fiction thriller Predestination, in which Ethan Hawke plays a time-traveling agent on his final assignment.

Ethan Hawke then reunited with his Gattaca director Andrew Niccol for Good Kill.

Bernstein and Ethan Hawke developed a friendship through the filming process, and the classical pianist performed for one of Ethan Hawke's theater groups.

Ethan Hawke had two films premiered at the 2015 TIFF, both garnering favorable reviews.

In November 2015, Ethan Hawke published his third novel, Rules for a Knight, in the form of a letter from a father to his four children about the moral values in life.

In 2016, Ethan Hawke starred in Ti West's western film In a Valley of Violence, in which he played a drifter seeking revenge in a small town controlled by its Marshal.

Ethan Hawke then portrayed two unpleasant characters in a row, first as the abusive father of a talented young baseball player in The Phenom, then as the harsh husband of Maud Lewis in Maudie.

Ethan Hawke subsequently reunited with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua and actor Denzel Washington for The Magnificent Seven, a remake of the 1960 western film of the same name.

In 2018, Ethan Hawke had two films premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Ethan Hawke was in the 2019 western drama The Kid, directed by Vincent D'Onofrio.

In 2022, Ethan Hawke starred as the primary villain Arthur Harrow in the Disney+ streaming series Moon Knight, produced by Marvel Studios, and as serial killer of children The Grabber in the Blumhouse feature, The Black Phone.

Ethan Hawke has described theater as his "first love", a place where he is "free to be more creative".

Ethan Hawke made his Broadway debut in 1992, portraying the playwright Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan.

Outside the New York stage, Ethan Hawke made an appearance in a 1995 production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, directed by Gary Sinise at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

Ethan Hawke returned to Broadway in Jack O'Brien's 2003 production of Henry IV, playing Henry Percy.

From November 2006 to May 2007, Ethan Hawke starred as Mikhail Bakunin in Tom Stoppard's trilogy play The Coast of Utopia, an eight-hour-long production at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York.

In 2009, Ethan Hawke appeared in two plays under British director Sam Mendes: as Trofimov in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and as Autolycus in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

In January 2010, Ethan Hawke directed his second play, A Lie of the Mind, by Sam Shepard on the New York stage.

Ethan Hawke said that he was drawn to the play's take on "the nature of reality", and its "weird juxtaposition of humor and mysticism".

Ethan Hawke next starred in the Off-Broadway premiere of a new play, Tommy Nohilly's Blood from a Stone, from December 2010 to February 2011.

Ethan Hawke won an Obie Award for his role in Blood from a Stone.

In 2019, Ethan Hawke returned to Broadway in the revival of Sam Shepard's True West, co-starring Paul Dano.

Ethan Hawke is a second cousin twice-removed of Tennessee Williams on his father's side.

Ethan Hawke's maternal grandfather, Howard Lemuel Green, served five terms in the Texas Legislature, served as the elected Tarrant County Judge in Texas from 1967 to 1975, and was a minor-league baseball commissioner.

On May 1,1998, Ethan Hawke married actress Uma Thurman, whom he had met on the set of Gattaca in 1996.

In 2008, Ethan Hawke married Ryan Shawhughes, who had briefly worked as a nanny to his and Thurman's children before graduating from Columbia University.

Ethan Hawke has served as a co-chair of the New York Public Library's Young Lions Committee, one of New York's major philanthropic boards.

In 2001, Ethan Hawke co-founded the Young Lions Fiction Award, an annual prize for achievements in fiction by writers under 35.

In May 2016, Ethan Hawke joined the library's board of trustees.

Ethan Hawke is a supporter of gay rights; in March 2011, he and his wife released a video supporting same-sex marriage in New York.

Ethan Hawke was critical of Donald Trump, criticizing him for his Make America Great Again slogan, and for threatening to put Hillary Clinton in jail.