Ethan Hawke

Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is an American actor, author, and filmmaker whose career on both stage and screen has spanned four decades. Known for his versatility across a range of roles and collaborations with director Richard Linklater, he has worked in both independent films and blockbusters. His accolades include a Daytime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for five Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, three Golden Globes, and a Tony Award.

Hawke made his film debut at age fourteen in Explorers (1985) and gained recognition for starring in Dead Poets Society (1989). He established himself as a leading man with the films Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), and Great Expectations (1998). He received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his roles in the crime thriller Training Day (2001) and coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014); the latter garnered him BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations in the same category. Hawke was Oscar-nominated twice for screenwriting two films from Before trilogy (1995–2013), in which he also starred. He earned Best Actor nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes for portraying lyricist Lorenz Hart in the biopic Blue Moon (2025).

Hawke garnered commercial success with Sinister (2012), The Purge (2013), The Magnificent Seven (2016), and the Black Phone films (2021–2025), and was praised for Maudie (2016) and First Reformed (2017). He directed the films Chelsea Walls (2001), The Hottest State (2006), Blaze (2018), and Wildcat (2023), as well as the documentaries Seymour: An Introduction (2014), The Last Movie Stars (2022), and Highway 99: A Double Album (2025). He portrayed abolitionist John Brown in the miniseries The Good Lord Bird (2020), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, and appeared as Arthur Harrow in the Marvel miniseries Moon Knight (2022).

Hawke has appeared in many theater productions. He 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, he was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for directing Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind. Divorced from actress Uma Thurman, he has been married to Ryan Shawhughes since 2008; he has two children from each marriage, including actors Maya and Levon Hawke.

Early life Ethan Green Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, on November 6, 1970. His father, James Hawke, was an insurance actuary, while his mother, Leslie (née Green), was a charity worker and teacher. Hawke's parents were high school sweethearts from Fort Worth, Texas, and married when his mother was seventeen. Hawke was born a year later, while both of his parents were attending the University of Texas in Austin. His parents separated and later divorced in 1974.

After his parents separated, Hawke was raised by his mother. Hawke often shifted his personality to fit in with different groups of peers that he encountered in their moves. There, he attended West Windsor Plainsboro High School before transferring to the Hun School of Princeton, a boarding school from which he graduated in 1988. Around this time, Hawke volunteered with his mother's organization, the Alex Fund, a charity that supported educational opportunities for underprivileged children in Romania. During his time at the Hun School, he also studied acting at the McCarter Theatre on the Princeton University campus. After graduating, Hawke continued to study acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh but left after being cast in Dead Poets Society (1989). He later enrolled in New York University's English program for two years before leaving to pursue acting full-time. The film received mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box office, leading Hawke to step away from acting for a time. He later described the experience as difficult to handle at such a young age, remarking, "I would never recommend that a kid act". The film was critically and commercially successful and won the BAFTA Award for Best Film. Reflecting on the impact of its success, Hawke later said, "I didn't want to be an actor and I went back to college. But then the film's success was so monumental that I was getting offers to be in such interesting movies and be in such interesting places and it seemed silly to pursue anything else."

In 1991, Hawke co-founded Malaparte, a Manhattan-based theater company that operated until 2000. His first leading role came with Randal Kleiser's film White Fang (1991), an adaptation of Jack London's novel of the same name, in which he portrayed a young Klondike gold prospector who befriends a wolfdog. A writer for The Oregonian appreciated how he kept the film from "being ridiculous or overly sentimental", while Roger Ebert praised how he was "properly callow at the beginning and properly matured at the end"; Hawke himself later called it the "single best experience of my acting life". In A Midnight Clear (1992), his character leads a group of American soldiers during World War II, tasked with capturing a small squad of German troops stationed in the Ardennes forest in France. Hawke made his Broadway debut in 1992, portraying the playwright Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan. He then played Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes, in the survival drama Alive (1993), adapted from Piers Paul Read's 1974 non-fiction book.

1994–2000: Established leading man Before Sunrise (1995) marked the first of Hawke's nine film collaborations with director Richard Linklater (pictured). In 1993, actress Winona Ryder offered Hawke a leading role in Ben Stiller's Generation X drama Reality Bites (1994). Hawke was reluctant to accept the offer due to his dislike of the characters, but he reconsidered it because he admired Ryder and appreciated the script. The film grossed $41 million on a budget of $11 million and later became a cult classic; of Hawke's performance, Owen Gleiberman said he had "suddenly grown up into a magnetic performer". With Reality Bites, Hawke attained celebrity status and became known as an alternative heartthrob, a perception fueled by his blue eyes, well-defined jaw, goatee, and tousled hair. His portrayal of a disillusioned musician in the film led to him being strongly associated with the character and deemed the poster boy of Generation X, The first installment of the Before film trilogy, Before Sunrise follows an American man (Hawke) and a French woman (Delpy) who meet on a train and disembark together in Vienna. The Hollywood Reporter retrospectively called it "one of cinema's most sustained explorations of love and the passage of time".

Hawke directed the music video for Lisa Loeb's US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Stay (I Missed You)"; Loeb was then a member of Hawke's theater company. Spin magazine named the video its Video of the Year in 1994. Hawke appeared in a 1995 production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, directed by Gary Sinise at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. In 1996 he published his first novel, titled The Hottest State, which tells the story of a love affair between a young actor and a singer. He described writing the book as both the "scariest [... but also] one of the best things I ever did." The New York Times thought Hawke did "a fine job of showing what it's like to be young and full of confusion", concluding The Hottest State was ultimately "a sweet love story".

Later that year, Hawke reprised his role from The Black Phone in its sequel, Black Phone 2, which grossed $132 million. The New York Times remarked that his performance "create a more cohesive picture than the original".

He then portrayed an investigative journalist in the crime drama series The Lowdown (2025). Critics identified the role as one in a series of Hawke's portrayals of self-righteous heroic characters driven to extremes that included his performances in First Reformed and The Good Lord Bird; The New Republic added that Hawke had been able to reiterate the archetype in a "striking variety of ways" across different genres. Hawke starred in the historical film The Weight, which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Hawke is set to reprise his role from The Lowdown in its second season and star in a film adaptation of Monte Reel's book The Last of the Tribe (2010) and a television adaptation of Richard Price's novel The Whites (2015). He has stated that he and Linklater have been working on a period film set in the 19th century.

Acting style and reception Hawke has been recognized for his versatility across a wide range of roles. Esquire named him the greatest actor of his generation, praising his varied body of work as a departure from contemporary Hollywood conventions. The A.V. Club described his career turn to genre films starting from the late 2000s as unexpected but successful, calling him the greatest contemporary "genre star". Hawke said that he enjoys the challenges posed by acting in different genres and settings with their own distinct rules, but identifies himself primarily as a dramatic actor. Scholar Gary Bettinson commented that Hawke exemplifies what film historian Jeanine Basinger described as a "neo-star"—an actor who combines elements of a traditional film star and a character actor.

Theater critic John Lahr opined that Hawke had first developed the skills that acting demands—"empathy, imagination, charm, [and] surrender"—through his experiences growing up with his mother. He enjoys theater because it grants actors control over their performance without the intervention of editing. By the 2020s, Hawke had begun practicing "third-person acting" as opposed to the "first-person acting" GQ remarked that Hawke has managed to embody the main moments in a man's life—from high school in Dead Poets Society, through first love in Before Sunrise and fatherhood in Boyhood, and into middle age in First Reformed and Juliet, Naked—through his roles.

"The idea of artistic integrity is a real balancing act. [...] Paul Schrader can want you but if he can't raise the money with you attached, you're going to lose that role." — Hawke in an interview with GQ However, he has commented on the need to balance less profitable independent productions with lucrative endeavors to support his family and several charities. Although Hawke has expressed disinterest for being in the public sphere, he frequently participates in press tours to promote his films, saying that "if you want people to have a chance to see a movie [...] you have to do it". especially early on in his career. Lahr remarked that Hawke's later public persona has become that of a "rough-edged, raucous actor" with a "full-blown [and] happy maturity". They have two children, Maya (born 1998) and Levon (born 2002), both of whom became actors. The couple separated in 2003 amidst allegations of infidelity and filed for divorce the following year, which was finalized in August 2005. Hawke and Thurman were described as a supercouple, with their marriage and divorce becoming the subject of intense tabloid scrutiny, much to their displeasure. Hawke found the tabloid attention "humiliating even when they [were] saying positive things". He stated that their relationship had begun a year after his divorce and that his first marriage had ended for reasons unrelated to Shawhughes.

An Episcopalian, Hawke has said that faith played a larger role in his youth but that he failed to develop it further in adulthood. He is an advocate for gay rights, releasing a video with Shawhughes supporting same-sex marriage in New York in 2011. He identifies as a feminist and has criticized the film industry for being "such a boys' club". A staunch supporter of the Democratic Party, Hawke has endorsed presidential candidates Bill Bradley in 2000, Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Kamala Harris in 2024. He criticized Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, for his Make America Great Again slogan and for threatening to put Clinton in jail. In 2015, Hawke advocated for the protection of St. Georges Bay, Canada, against oil and gas explorations, participating in an event organized by the local Mi'kmaq community and saying that the wishes of First Nations people should be respected; he had owned property in the area since 2000.

Hawke began participating in charity work at the behest of his mother, who encouraged him to donate a portion of his salary from Dead Poets Society to the Doe Fund, a non-profit organization. Hawke serves on the board of trustees of his mother's foundation, the Alex Fund. He served as co-chair of the Young Lions Committee, one of the New York Public Library's (NYPL) major philanthropic boards, and co-founded the Young Lions Fiction Award in 2001. He was named a Library Lion by the NYPL in November 2010 and joined the library's board of trustees in May 2016. He joined the board of trustees of the Classical Theatre of Harlem in April 2023 and made fundraising videos for the American Library Association and the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

Publications