Ethan Hawke

An actor, screen­writer, direc­tor and author, Ethan Hawke has estab­lished him­self as one of the most dis­tinc­tive artists in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. Since his debut as a teenag­er, he has built a career dri­ven by curios­i­ty and high stan­dards, between major main­stream films, inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma and per­son­al projects.
Born in Austin, Texas, Hawke stud­ied act­ing at Prince­ton, then in Great Britain and Pitts­burgh. He made his on-screen debut at 14 in Joe Dante’s fan­ta­sy film Explor­ers (1985), before break­ing out four years lat­er with Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Soci­ety, a mas­sive crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial success.
He quick­ly demon­strat­ed his abil­i­ty to inhab­it vast­ly dif­fer­ent worlds. After Ran­dal Kleiser’s adven­ture film White Fang (1991) and Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi fea­ture Gat­ta­ca (1997), he dis­tin­guished him­self in the crime genre with Antoine Fuqua’s Train­ing Day (2001), earn­ing his first Oscar nom­i­na­tion. He went on to star in sev­er­al notable thrillers, includ­ing Sid­ney Lumet’s Before the Dev­il Knows You’re Dead (2007), Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2018) and Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind (2023). He has also explored the hor­ror genre with Sin­is­ter (2012) and The Black Phone (2022−2025), both direct­ed by Scott Der­rick­son, as well as James DeMonaco’s The Purge (2013) and Robert Eggers’ epic The North­man (2022).
His col­lab­o­ra­tions with Richard Lin­klater, with whom he has worked nine times, have left a last­ing mark on his career. He played Jesse in the “Before” tril­o­gy, Before Sun­rise (1995), Before Sun­set (2004) and Before Mid­night (2013), earn­ing two Oscar nom­i­na­tions for Best Adapt­ed Screen­play, along­side the direc­tor and Julie Delpy. He reunit­ed with the direc­tor for Boy­hood (2015), for which he earned his sec­ond Oscar nom­i­na­tion for Best Sup­port­ing Actor. In 2025, he starred in Blue Moon, receiv­ing an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for Best Actor.
Along­side his act­ing career, Ethan Hawke has devel­oped his own body of work as a direc­tor and screen­writer. After the short film Straight to One (1994), he direct­ed his first fea­ture film, Chelsea Walls (2001), which pre­miered at Direc­tors’ Fort­night. He then direct­ed The Hottest State (2007), an adap­ta­tion of his own nov­el pub­lished in 2003. He went on to direct Blaze (2018), a film about musi­cian Blaze Foley, fol­lowed by Wild­cat (2023), a biopic of writer Flan­nery O’Connor. He has also direct­ed sev­er­al acclaimed doc­u­men­taries, among them Sey­mour: An Intro­duc­tion (2014), a por­trait of pianist Sey­mour Bern­stein, and the doc­u­men­tary series The Last Movie Stars (2022), chron­i­cling the lives and careers of Joanne Wood­ward and Paul Newman.
A com­plete artist, Ethan Hawke also has a dis­tin­guished career in the­ater, par­tic­u­lar­ly on Broad­way, where he has act­ed in works by Anton Chekhov, William Shake­speare and Ten­nessee Williams. He will next appear in The Weight direct­ed by Padra­ic McKinley.