“I never wanted to be an actor. I always wanted to be a writer. And that’s what I will be if this circus ever stops.” – Richard Burton

The first thing you notice when the actor, nascent director, theatre company founder, Oscar nominee and writer of two novels emerges through the black curtain and into the Project Theatre’s spotlight is how almost heartbreakingly exhausted he looks. His hair has been snipped into one of those choppy, deliberately asymmetrical thatches, but nonetheless has an unattended-looking quality that no amount of deliberate fussing in front of the mirror could have supplied. His face, more furrowed, aged, than it looks on screen, speaks of pillow-creased sleep deprivation mingled with the up-for-it grinniness that comes with over-exhaustion. This bedheaded quality, in conjunction with his collegiate Saturday-indoors ensemble (rumpled combats; secondhand gas-station-attendant shirt) and slow, smiling, blinking shuffle downstage to the book-reading table, lends him the slightly shocked-looking appearance of one who has been called rather unexpectedly from bed to greet guests.

This is Ethan Hawke, recognisable as one of several young Americans who represented, unwittingly or not, the ’90s Gen-X disaffection on-screen, most notably opposite Winona Ryder in Reality Bites and as the ultimate youthful pessimist in Hamlet. He established himself as a young actor with the role of a lifetime, appearing with Robin Williams as the boarding-school ingenue in Dead Poets Society. Hawke has the classical actor’s reverence for the theatre and has founded a company called Malaparte and he has quietly given humble but bang-on performances in smallish, indie and off-kilter films such as Gattaca, Tape and Waking Life. Most recently, he won an Oscar nomination for his green rookie cop opposite Denzel Washington’s blackhearted veteran in Training Day.

But today is about Ethan Hawke the novelist, and about reading from and talking up Ash Wednesday, his second novel. And it would seem that the Hollywood marketing production line, weirdly, has nothing on the iron-man decathlon demands of the book-promotion machine. The rumour is that he’s been back and forth from London to Dublin, for various press interviews, public readings and breakfast-television appearances, five times in the last three days.

So the falling-down tiredness is the first thing you notice. The next thing is how pronounced his Texas twang is in, so to speak, real life: here, when he is working at the least famous of his several professions and one which does not dictate that he sound like a generic young American. His dustbowl drawl will broaden charmingly when he begins to read, one steadying hand on the podium, the other gesturing repeatedly in a charmingly awkward, non-Hollywood-actorish manner, for emphasis.

The scene he chooses to read from is one where the two protagonists are driving through the middle-American night, the pregnant woman asleep, the man wired with elation and fear, the pair having been married for exactly 29 hours. The audience today is about 70% slightly bookish-looking women.

In addition to Ethan’s reading, today involves a public interview by Irish Times journalist Hugh Linehan, then some questions from the floor, and lastly, a book signing downstairs. Ethan himself outlines this plan for us at the start, in the slightly over-smiling, effort-making manner of the bashful host. “And then you can… come up and walk on these I guess, if you want,” he drawls, nudging a booted foot against the edge of a huge Ash Wednesday billboard poster that has been inexplicably taped to the stage floor, ostensibly as decoration. “Tread softly,” he adds, not looking up.

It’s the day before, in the press-interview suite. “One of the things I love most about Cassavettes,” Ethan Hawke is musing, “is that, if you think about it, most men who are really self-possessed, and who consider themselves Artists,” he says, in a voice of comic over-gravity, “y’know, who are gonna Go Make Art – so many of them, aren’t interested in women, at all. So what I think is remarkable about Cassavettes, is how much of his filmmaking is about women. Or, one woman. I mean, his wife [actress Gena Rowlands] is the centrepiece of most of his work. And it’s like, with every film he does, he’s trying to work out this thing of trying to understand her. And it’s just unbelievably powerful.”

It’s apt that one of Ethan Hawke’s biggest heroes has come up in today’s conversation. As in John Cassavettes’ filmmaking, Ash Wednesday is essentially an exploration of the process of loving another person, and the rediscovery and redefinition that transforms the lover himself in the process. It makes sense as well that it was after Hawke acted in a similarly exploratory love story, Before Sunrise, directed by frequent Hawke ally Richard Linklater, that he first found, in his words, the courage to be a novelist.

“It was from Richard that I learned that an ‘adventure’ story didn’t have to be about helicopter crashes and stuff like that,” he explains. “In Before Sunrise, the adventure was in really getting to know a woman, not knowing what was going to happen next, not being in control of it. The greatest adventure you can have is an interior one.”

A great adventure through and through, Ash Wednesday, it should be said, is pretty brilliant. Its one great flaw is that it relies more than once on lifting a particular casual, youthful vernacular almost verbatim from another American who populates his stories with intelligent, sensitive, spiritually lost protagonists, The Catcher In The Rye author JD Salinger.

But Ash Wednesday’s cast of characters feels so real, its pace so vital and natural, its descriptive passages of horizons both interior and exterior so lucid, and its exploration of the inner landscape of a relationship so voluptuously honest that any dimestore pinching of the odd Salingerism is merely the surface larceny, borne of insecurity, of a still very young novelist.

Hawke’s financial security (relative to most young novelists, anyway) aside, he has more reason to be insecure than the average nascent writer. Reviews of his first novel, The Hottest State, ran from cool enthusiasm to outraged, knives-out cattiness of a kind that would get a book critic sacked if applied to (you can imagine this tacit phrase hanging unenunciated in a critic’s mind) “a proper novelist”. It’s as if a person is not allowed to be what Brian Eno termed a dilettante: that is, good at, and passionate about, more than one thing.

“Oh, sure. ‘Pick something, and stick with it,’” Hawke agrees. “I know. This idea that you have to specialise yourself, in order to get by in life. In a way it kinda does the opposite of help you get by, it kinda kills you a little bit. I mean, when you’re a kid, you play sports, you paint, you build things and whatever else, and then at a certain age we’re told that we’re supposed to pick one thing and go for it, and never mind any other impulses that you have.” He pauses. “There’s a great line I read once,” he says. “‘Improve in one talent, and God will give you more.’

“Some people think that, if I write, I must not like acting,” he says, slightly defensively. “You know, that I must be disappointed in some way, that somehow acting isn’t enough, or... (long pause) And it’s not the case at all. It doesn’t stem from that at all. I actually find acting and writing much more related, much more similar, than that. I mean, I’ve spent my life, as an actor, looking at pages, and breaking down scenes, and trying to figure out what the point of them is: why is this scene here? Why is this sentence here?

“And my ‘in’ to writing, at all, is as an actor. I basically look at writing as a collection of characterisations, and controlled improvs on a theme. So I’ll kinda get a character goin’, and kinda improvise, and get the voices rollin’, y’know, and then shape it from there. If anything, it feeds back into what I do as an actor and director.

“And it’s funny,” he considers. “You know why else writing’s great? It’s great too, ‘cos, y’know, one of the things that’s a drag about being an actor, is, somebody has to give you a job. And it can make you crazy, sitting around waiting for a job. And if I’m writing, I don’t worry about it.”

Saturday again. The Irish Times reading. It’s near the end of the session and, as such, Ethan’s courteous professionalism has relaxed a bit into anecdote-spinning candour.
“I was really grateful to get Training Day. I was really sort of out of it at that period,” he says vaguely, and we can only imagine what that sweaty shadowland of the decreasingly famous must be like. The 1990s, it seems, consisted mostly of his not securing the roles he most wanted, compounded by being tacitly or blatantly mocked for becoming a novelist. We sit and listen, amused and slightly shocked as he recounts the begging-bowl process of fighting to be considered for audition time, as his erstwhile contemporaries, alongside whom he once was labelled ‘a promising new talent’, sailed ahead into glitzy box-office success. “Meanwhile,” he says, smirking blackly at the memory, “I’m sittin’ home, readin’ about them.”

Of course, the other thing Ethan Hawke spent the ’90s doing is meeting and falling in love with his wife, the actress Uma Thurman.

“I guess, when you find what you’ve always wanted, that’s not where the beginning begins, that’s where the end starts.” – Elizabeth Taylor

The fact that his book is entitled Ash Wednesday, and that the action crescendoes to its most dramatic point the day after Mardi Gras, has a beautiful symmetry: while the novel is an examination of a marriage, it’s not about getting married: it’s about everything that happens afterward. It’s not about the out-of-the-ordinary holiday-aspect of Mardi Gras, but about what comes next.

“I had this idea that really trying to love another human being, is kind of the first step out of a totally self-absorbed, self-immersed way of living your life,” Hawke says of his book’s quasi-sacramental title. “And as soon as you really start loving someone else, it’s your first step out of yourself.

“Loving somebody else, for me, really trying to love them – not, like, ‘feeling in love’ or anything like that but really trying to love somebody else,” he stresses, “is the closest thing I’d ever had to the way people talk about a religious experience.

“Also, being too concerned with being in control in your life, ends up making you feel really chaotic, because you can’t control these things. And there’s something about giving over, when you love somebody, shedding your own identity, and giving up your ego, that lets all this freedom into your life, all this room for you to really grow, and really change, and really respond.”

We are talking about fairytale marriages, with the emphasis on ‘fairytale’: the passionate blaze, doomed ultimately to fail, of Elizabeth Taylor’s to Richard Burton (Hawke’s favourite actor); the blood-sealed but brief union of Billy Bob and Angelina; and, again, the muse-and-poet symbiosis of writer-director John Cassavettes and actress Gena Rowlands. What we are not talking about, as yet, is his own marriage to Uma, whom he met five years ago on the set of Gattaca, and with whom he lives, with their two children, far from the limelight in an anonymous sidestreet in Manhattan.

“I know it’s a cliché,” Hawke says, “but I think, in marriage or anything else, you pretty much get what you give. Not always. But pretty much.

“I mean, there are certain romances that are just so goddam exciting – Rowlands and Cassavettes, Taylor and Burton – but the day to day living of things, probably, is very difficult. And if your priority in life is to have a great relationship with your children, you probably will be a great parent. And if your priority is your career, then your career will probably be OK. Not always. Certainly not always. But probably. And if your priority is to love this person, and to care for them, and that is really the great priority in your life, it will probably work out.

“And I think that love dies a little bit when you stop caring: when something else becomes a priority. And maybe we’re not in control of whether that happens or not. But maybe we are.”

What was your wife’s reaction to this book? I ask. (There is a long silence.)

I’m asking not because she’s famous, I say, but because this is a book about marriage and she’s your wife.

“Mmm…” (smiling politely as the drawbridge goes up) “You’d really have to ask her.”

If my husband wrote a novel about a marriage, I suggest, I’d be unbelievably bashful about reading it. I’d be terrified to open it.

“I wonder. What was her reaction.” (another massive silence) “I think that – ultimately… ultimately, she was kind of… thrilled by it. She was really scared to read it. She was really kinda petrified about it.

“It’s really a work of fiction,” he continues, very slowly. “And she was really pleased to see that it was a work of fiction – and at the same time, pleased and thrilled to see… elements of things that we’d gone through, used in the service of art. You know? I mean, she’s an artist. So it’s kinda neat if your experiences in some way serve to…”

He stops, thinks some more. “I mean, ultimately, I wouldn’t do these things if I didn’t believe there was value in it. All forms of art, whether you’re making movies or writing books or playing music, they’re about sharing experiences, and there’s this idea that in talking about things, healing can happen, and growth and learning can happen. You kinda start a conversation, hoping that that communication might work to some kind of good.

“In some way I think she kinda dug it. And on another level I think she probably…” Then he bursts out laughing, the tension broken. “You’d have to talk to her, you know? I’m curious about that myself.”

The Auteurs

Five thesps who branched out

WILL SMITH
Onetime sitcom class clown (Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) turned serious actor (Six Degrees of Separation) turned blockbuster star (Independence Day). Forged world-cracking career gettin’ jiggy wit de rap-lite (Big Willy Style). Now the poster-boy for multi-media brand synergy (the simultaneous film/ CD/ videogame releases for Wild Wild West and MIIB). Said by some to have political ambitions.

BILLY BOB THORNTON
played drums and sang in twang-rock bands for rent money while working to become screenwriter (One False Move; The Gift), actor (Pushing Tin; The Man Who Wasn’t There) and director (All The Pretty Horses). Nominated for two Oscars as an actor; won as a writer (for Sling Blade, in which he also directed and starred). Recently released country-noir solo debut Private Radio.

JENNIFER LOPEZ
First appeared on comedy-variety show In Living Colour as dancing Fly Girl; submitted intelligent, underplayed performances in Out Of Sight and U-Turn; stunned a planet to attention with debut album On The 6 and accompanying megasultry videos; now undisputed queen of soul-pop. Unwittingly brought having a large posterior back into vogue.

KEANU REEVES
Took getting by on (considerable) good looks to new heights. Turned in uniformly one-dimensional performances in a number of excellent pictures (My Own Private Idaho; Dangerous Liaisons); became most action-free action hero in cinema history (Speed, The Matrix). Changed the face of music as we know it as bassist in indie-blues band Dogstar. OK, no he didn’t.

VINCENT GALLO
Formed a number of bands, including Gray, with legendary New York artist Jean Michel Basquiat. Came to prominence as actor in offbeat small-budget films(Nenette Et Boni, Trouble Every Day); made spectacularly accomplished debut as screenwriter/ director/producer/star in Buffalo 66; also wrote its score. Releases narcotised sex-lullaby solo albums on Warp Records. Has modeled for Calvin Klein among others.