#2425 - Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking in.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Ethan Hawke (0:14)

Nice to meet you.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Great to meet you, man. It's weird when you see someone in so many fucking movies, and then you meet them in real life. I'm like, okay, just a regular person, right there.

Ethan Hawke (0:22)

Yeah, staring me in the face. He just took a leak.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

Yeah. Dude, you've been in some fucking banger movies, man. It's like you've had an incredible career.

Ethan Hawke (0:35)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Pull that sucker, pull that microphone.

Ethan Hawke (0:37)

You pull it towards me?

Joe Rogan (0:38)

Yeah.

Ethan Hawke (0:38)

All right. Very good. Yeah, it's been a long, strange trip.

Joe Rogan (0:42)

It's been a wild one, huh?

Ethan Hawke (0:43)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:44)

When did you start acting?

Ethan Hawke (0:46)

How old were you? All right. So I'm like 12 years old. I don't have a winter sport. My mother doesn't know what to do with me. And my next door neighbor, he lived like four houses down. He took an acting class at the Paul Robeson Center of Performing Arts. And so my mother signed me up so that I could get picked up by his mom, you know, take into acting class in the winter and get dropped off, you know, and be at home. And I went there, and this head of a local theater company came by to teach an improv seminar, kind of thing. I mean, I'm 12 years old, right? And afterwards in the parking lot, he said, hey, you want to be in a play? I said, what do you mean? He says, I got a part of a guy who's a knight. He gets to have a sword. And I said, well, I have any lines? He said, you'll have one line. I said, all right, cool. And I asked my mom, and she said, do I have to pay? You know, and I said, I don't think so. I think they're going to pay me.

So I went and I did this play, and it was George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan at the McCarter Theater in New Jersey. And...

Joe Rogan (1:53)

That was a real play.

Ethan Hawke (1:54)

Yeah, it was a proper play. And it was an incredible experience, to be honest with you, because my parents hated their jobs. You know, they would go to work, and their life happened on the periphery of their employment. You know, my mom would take the train to New York, and so she wouldn't get home till 730, something she would leave at dawn. And she was as miserable at work, I mean. And I went to this rehearsal, and everyone was having... They were talking about whether or not God existed. They were talking about what they believed in. They would dress up in these crazy outfits. And then we did the play, and they got a standing ovation. And it was so much fun. And it was the first time I saw this. I was like, You could do this for a living? You know, a lot of the actors aren't people you've heard of or anything like that, but they were real actors, and they loved their job. And the rehearsal room was so kind of thrilling, watching them figure out where people should stand, and what was important, and what was the scene about, and what was the theme of the play, and how could this scene fit in with the larger context.

And I just decided that's what I wanted to do. And a lot of kids want to act, so that doesn't mean very much. But I, through this other friend of mine, I started hearing about open casting calls in New York. And I asked my mom if I could go on some of these big auditions. And again, she said, is it going to cost me any money? She said, if I paid for my own train fare, I could go to these auditions. So I took some Polaroids and went on a few of these big auditions, and I got one of them. And it was for this big, in 1984, it was a $30 million movie directed by the guy who had just done Gremlins, right? Joe Dante. And I thought I was a made man. I mean, it was absolutely incredible to be sucked out of suburban America and brought to LA. My first scene partner was River Phoenix, and all of a sudden, I'm in LA. And my mom couldn't quit her job or anything, so my mom had a really turbulent relationship with her mother. But her mother and she didn't really know each other, and so her mother said she'd be my guardian. And my mom designed this as a way to maybe have a family healing, but my grandmother was a piece of work. And we lived together in Koreatown, that's what they called it, and it was wild. And I remember we drove into Paramount Studios. You know, you can picture the image from The Godfather, and you had the big gates. And my grandmother had always wanted to be a movie star.