(Credit: Nicolas Genin)
Ethan Hawke has walked his own path in Hollywood. Starting out as a young up-and-comer with movies like 1989’s Dead Poets Society and 1994’s Reality Bites, he quickly moved into his own particular groove, setting aside opportunities to become a mainstream leading man and taking on roles in teeny indies like Before Sunrise and studio gambles like Gattaca.
Since the 1990s, Hawke has worked steadily as an actor and director, continually opting for outside-the-box projects. He’s done dark dramas like 2011’s The Woman in the Fifth and 2017’s First Reformed, as well as horror like 2012’s Sinister, 2013’s The Purge, and 2021’s The Black Phone. Along the way, he’s picked up four Oscar nominations.
Hawke has been one of Hollywood’s most unpredictable stars of the past few decades, but it might never have happened. Early in his career, he quit the business entirely, convinced that it had nothing in store for him but heartache. Speaking to The New York Times in 2002, he reminisced about his debut film, Joe Dante’s Explorers, which he starred in alongside River Phoenix at age 14.
“It was a really big deal in my hometown,” he remembered. “Then it came out, and it was a bomb. I stopped acting after that. I would never recommend that a kid act.”
Released in 1985, Explorers is a science fiction adventure movie that follows two boys who build a spaceship and visit another planet with friendly extraterrestrials. It bombed at the box office, which Dante later blamed on its release date coinciding with the Live Aid Concert that drew close to two billion television viewers. However, it also had a lot to do with the rushed production.
The studio wanted Dante to finish the film as quickly as possible, even before the script was finished. He said that things were so hasty that the cement on the sets wasn’t even dry when Hawke and Phoenix were doing their scenes.
However, the director had nothing but positive things to say about Hawke. Speaking to an audience in 2008, he recalled that the young actor hadn’t even intended to audition for the part. “He came to the reading with another kid who was a friend of his who was an actor and I just looked at him and I said, ‘This kid is really cute.’ He had a huge mouthful of braces but I said, ‘Let’s see if he can act.’”
No matter how much he loved the filming part of the experience, Hawke was so devastated by the critical and box office reception that he decided he would exit the business just as his career was kicking off. He did theatre in high school and attended university briefly, but something about it didn’t feel right. So, on a whim, he auditioned for a role in Dead Poets Society, four years after the heartbreak of Explorers.
It couldn’t have been a more perfect re-entry into the industry. The film’s trajectory was exactly the opposite of Dante’s film. Explorers had a budget of around $25 million and barely scraped together $9 million at the box office. Dead Poets Society had a budget of around $16.5 million and raked in a stunning $236 million. With wind in his sails, Hawke was perfectly positioned to take on Hollywood.
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