By GABY WOOD
Ethan Hawke and his wife, Uma Thurman, have escaped Hollywood by living on the East Coast of America. But the actors can hardly emigrate from the land of fame, and it's a subject Hawke, who is a novelist among other things, would like to write about some day.
"People love actors. They love reading about them and thinking about their lives. But they also secretly hate them. They think their lives are frivolous and all they do is go to parties and don't know real problems," he says.
"There's something at the root of our love-hate relationship with celebrity that I think has the makings, if you could do it in a substantive way, of a great modern American novel. And it's something I know a lot about, so I feel like that's the book I should write."
Hawke's second book, Ash Wednesday, is a novel about love and anguish. Many will be surprised by the book's quality (one review of his first novel grudgingly hailed it, "One of the least pretentious things ever written by someone with a goatee"), but the sentiments in Ash Wednesday are entirely in keeping with what Hawke has come to represent on screen. If there's one thing that links the characters he has played, it is that they are philosophical.
He first came to prominence in 1989 as the burdened schoolboy in Dead Poets Society, then played the Heidegger-reading slacker in the Gen X movie Reality Bites, and Julie Delpy's existentialist stranger on a train in Before Sunrise. In Gattaca, the sci-fi blockbuster on which he met Thurman, he plays a sort of tragic hero with a secret and potentially fatal flaw and, more recently, he was excellent as an anti-corporate, digital video Hamlet.
Hawke was the man of a particularly cerebral, disaffected moment and now, at 31, he has eased into a different sort of success: in the past two years he has been nominated for an Oscar (for his rookie detective in Training Day), made his directorial debut with Chelsea Walls, written a novel, starred in Richard Linklater's new films Waking Life (a semi-animated narrative-free affair in which he and Delpy briefly reprise their Before Sunrise characters) and Tape, and had a second child.
Hawke speaks with ease and affection about his family. He and Thurman were married in 1998 and now have two children - Maya Ray, 4, and Levon Roan, who was born last January.
He volunteers comments and comparisons that include the words "my wife" fairly regularly, and shows empathy for the fact that there are, as he says, "so many piss-poor parts for women".
He believes acting is much harder for women, and he "can say that because I've learnt a lot about it from my wife. As a male, you don't get sexually objectified the way you do as a girl. When I was 19 they were asking me to be in White Fang. I was going up to Alaska and hangin' out with a wolf; when Uma was 19 they were putting her in Henry and June, asking her to take off her clothes and make out with another woman."
We talk about Thurman's family - she is the daughter of the first Westerner to have become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and Nena, a Swedish ex-model who was discovered by Norman Parkinson. Nena's first husband was Timothy Leary, who was, until he died six years ago, Uma's godfather. I ask Hawke if he ever met him.
"I never did and I really wanted to. Richard Linklater and I have always been planning this weird movie; we wanted to do a documentary about America, where I was going to be the narrator. We were going to start it by interviewing Timothy Leary on his deathbed, but we didn't get there in time."
Unlike Thurman, Hawke is not a Buddhist, though he says he finds it "a very beautiful philosophy. It's entirely rooted in the interconnected nature of man, and compassion for all living things."
Hawke's childhood was not quite so glamorous or countercultural. He was born in Austin, Texas, to a 19-year-old father and a 17-year-old mother. His parents split up when he was young, and he was raised by his single mother in West Windsor, New Jersey.
As a teenager, he acted in plays at the McCarter Theatre in nearby Princeton and, at 14, was cast alongside River Phoenix in a movie called Explorers.
"I was so disappointed when that movie didn't do well," he says. "But thank God, because it would have been devastating for me to be known as the kid from Explorers."
He went back to school, spent a few months at university, and dropped out to appear in Dead Poets Society. Overnight, he had a career.
He has said in the past that he thought of success as a shameful thing, and I ask him how he thinks of it now.
"I think what I meant," he muses, "particularly as a young actor, is that you really struggle with the sense of being undeserving of the attention. And you're right. It happens all the time, there's some new young actor who people are going to put on the cover of magazines and will talk about, and all you did is say 15 lines in a movie.
"You know, it's not like you started Greenpeace or something. They don't even put the guys who started Greenpeace on the cover of a magazine.
"So you understand the sense of fraudulence, and it's attached to yourself, you know? And that's what I was struggling with. And the trick is, it's just a game, and the more you can keep your sense of humour about it all the more sane you'll stay."
Both Hawke and Thurman started acting when they were young. When they met, he has said, he wanted to ask her: How has it been for you?
"I resisted falling in love with her as long as I could," Hawke says, "because I didn't want any more celebrity in my life. But you can't choose who you love. And the truth is that she's really helped me learn how to deal with it. We can help each other with it. But it does kill a little sense of mystery that I think is conducive to being an actor."
We are back to the topic of the Great American Novel. I wonder if Hawke feels that being famous limits his own powers of observation, powers he might need as a novelist. "It does," he says, "because I can only judge by how I feel when I'm with ... like, say I met Jennifer Lopez, or someone - I don't think I'd be completely myself with her, you know? So you think, well if people feel that way about me then they're not being themselves with me, and it's like, how are they being? How are they different? And you don't really know. My relationship to reality has been so utterly skewed for so long that I don't even notice it any more. It's just my reality."
He quotes a story by Sam Shepard.
"There's a line in Cruising Paradise where some woman says to the narrator, 'You drive all the time - when you drive, do you take the more authentic roads?"' And he says, 'Well, that's the funny thing about roads - they're all authentic.' And you know, people will say the life of a celebrity's so unreal. No, it is real, that's what's weird about it. It's really happening. It may not be what you want it to be, but it's very goddamn real."
I say that reminds me of a line he wrote himself, and he quotes it back to me from memory. "I felt like I'd found my destiny, and I had, but just because something's my destiny doesn't mean it's any good.
"I like that, too," he says. "It always makes me laugh."
* Waking Life is screening now at the Academy, Auckland.
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