“If you care about Texas, you care about Tommy Lee Jones,” Ethan Hawke says of his onscreen father in season two of The Lowdown, FX’s neo-noir crime comedy series. The Lone Star State native has cultivated a warm reverence for many of his costars across 40 years in film and TV, as Hawke shares in the latest installment of Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection.
Watching Denzel Washington improvise in Hawke’s first “proper Hollywood movie,” the 2001 police drama Training Day, “was like watching Eric Clapton with a guitar or Miles Davis with a trumpet. It was just staggering.” And acting in Sidney Lumet’s final movie, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2014, offered a bittersweet glimpse into an unrealized future. Says Hawke, “You know, I thought I would have him to pal around with the rest of my life.”
As for his role in the 1994 coming-of-age romance Reality Bites, Hawke credits costar Winona Ryder with getting him on board. “Not enough has been said about Winona Ryder’s impact on other people’s careers. Winona Ryder was extremely successful at a young age. She was, at the time period that we did this, you gotta think what Taylor Swift is to right now. I mean, Winona Ryder was it,” says Hawke, who attended Swift’s Madison Square Garden wedding to Travis Kelce after starring in the 2024 music video for her song “Fortnight.”
“She was cool, all her movies were smart and interesting—Heathers, Beetlejuice, Age of Innocence with Scorsese, Mermaids,” Hawke continues. “Everything she did was a hit, smart, irreverent, punk. She was really, really cool. And she greenlit this movie. Because she had seen this obscure show called The Ben Stiller Show, which she thought was incredibly funny, and she thought he should be directing movies…. It was Winona’s belief in Ben and the script that made this movie happen.”
That would be Reality Bites costar Ben Stiller, who also made his feature directorial debut with the film. Hawke now considers Stiller to be “one of the best directors of my generation,” but they may have been on different pages as younger actors. “We would do 10,000 takes of his performance and, like, one of mine,” Hawke recalls. “He was completely disinterested in my performance and obsessed with his own, which was extremely irritating.”
Hawke says he and Stiller can find humor in their experience now—“If Ben were here, he would giggle, laugh, and tease me right back,” Hawke tells VF. “But it was true.”
Over the course of the 30-minute walk down memory lane, Hawke recalls the “brutal” process of shaving his head for an Oscar-nominated turn as Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart in last year’s Blue Moon, which reunited him with Before Sunrise filmmaker Richard Linklater. And Hawke shares why fans of the ambiguous ending to Paul Schrader’s 2018 religious drama, First Reformed, should thank Martin Scorsese.
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