Ethan Hawke says the people who think they control Hollywood are headed for a reckoning, and he isn’t softening the language he uses to describe them.
In a new interview with GQ, the Oscar-nominated actor said he believes a broad rebellion is coming against the industry’s most powerful figures.
“I believe in rebellion. And I think people are going to wake up and punch back and there’s going to be massive movements in music and massive movements in live theater and massive movements of people getting together,” Hawke said.
“Don’t worry that the money and the greedy bastards that think they control everybody, they always lose in the end. And they’re all going in the grave eventually. They think they’re winning, but they’re losing because their lives are worthless.”
Hawke also took aim at the financial logic driving the business, saying the work actors care about most is usually the work that pays the least.
“There’s a direct correlation. I find that the more you love a project, the less you get paid,” he said. “If you want to beat the algorithm, it’s very difficult to do that and be paid.”
Not his first warning about fame
Hawke has made similar arguments before. Last year, on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” he described celebrity as something closer to a toxin than an achievement.
“I think celebrity is like a tiny drop of mercury. Or it’s poison. It’s poison for your brain,” Hawke said. “To be a professional actor at a young age, it’s dangerous in extremely insidious ways that are very, very hard to perceive when it’s happening.”
Rogan compared early fame to concrete poured with the wrong mix of water or cement — once it sets wrong, he said, there’s no fixing it. Hawke agreed the comparison extends beyond acting.
“That analogy works for all walks of life. Really. If you have something really traumatic happen in childhood, it’s very hard to recover. It’s a tremendous amount of work to recover,” Hawke said.
He returned to the theme in the GQ interview, pointing to Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson as examples of fame curdling into isolation.
“I wouldn’t be the first person to say that there’s an aspect of celebrity that is like a disease. And you can handle little bits of it, but too much of it — we can see what happened to Elvis and we can see Michael Jackson. It’s a form of isolation. It’s like being put in a zoo, and zoo animals go nuts. So do human beings.”
“And it seems like a kind of nice isolation because people are giving you money, and they’re telling you you’re wonderful, but nobody’s being real with you,” Hawke continued. “And that makes people insane. And they start scratching, trying to find some real life. And sometimes people do that with drugs, some people do that with acting out or getting in fights or whatever the ways that people do it.”
Other actors have said the same
Hawke isn’t alone in criticizing the business from the inside. Last year, Dakota Johnson called the industry a “mess” during an appearance on “Hot Ones,” when host Sean Evans asked why Hollywood has become so risk-averse.
“I think it’s hard when creative decisions are made by a committee, and it’s hard when creative decisions are made by people who don’t even really watch movies or know anything about them … that tends to be what’s occurring a lot,” Johnson said.
Johnson, the daughter of actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, said studios keep chasing the same formulas instead of letting audiences see something new.
“When something does well … studios want to keep that going so they remake the same things,” she said. “But humans don’t want that. They want fresh. They want to feel new things, experience new things, see new things.”
“So I don’t know, I guess it’s all just a bit of a mess right now, isn’t it?” she added.
