Hawke’s Hart spends a lot of his time and energy focused on Elizabeth Weiland, a beautiful young woman who has clearly friend-zoned him. Though his obsession is confusing to those around him—it’s a pretty open secret that Hart is gay—it made perfect sense to Hawke. “He thinks he’s hurt about this woman, but he can’t really look at the real wound,” the actor says. “He was a person who was probably in a lot of pain as a young man, and immediately his best friend was breaking up with him.”
Though he didn’t realize it at the time, Hawke spent his whole career training for the demands of this role. Before Sunrise taught Hawke how to perform demanding dialogue without losing the audience’s attention. “Most film actors aren’t asked to talk that much,” he says. “That’s something you can’t unlearn once you feel what that’s like—it’s like breaking through a wall or something.” Hawke and Linklater’s 2001 film Tape was similarly dialogue-heavy and set in just one location (a motel room in Lansing, Michigan). “That’s the first time I became an adult actor,” Hawke says. “Something happened on that movie that got me ready for Training Day.”
If Hawke had never played Macbeth (in a Broadway revival at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 2013), he also wouldn’t have been ready for Blue Moon. All roads have led him here. “The guy who was in Reality Bites was not ready to do this movie,” he says. “And it’s fun to movie yourself learn—that feels really good.”
In the end, our lunch is mostly uninterrupted; only one person stops to talk to Hawke, though I catch a few who try to hover nearby or walk very slowly by our table. Hawke says he and Linklater are in Toronto not only to promote Blue Moon, but also because they’re trying to finance their next collaboration. He won’t say much else, other than that the project is set in the 19th century, and they’ve been discussing it even longer than Blue Moon—since 1998. “When you say 19th century, it sounds like it’s going to be boring, but it’s not,” Hawke says. “It’s revolutionary, like Boyhood or Waking Life or the Before trilogy. It’s much more Linklater’s version of what’s happened to us in regards to our belief in equality and our identity as Americans.”
They’ve been singing for their supper—a.k.a. meeting with financiers—and Hawke says the fate of the film “hangs in the balance as we speak.” It’s bewildering to him that someone with Linklater’s history—the auteur behind Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and Boyhood—still has to fight this way. “It’s so strange to movie all these people fawn over him and not give him the money to make another movie,” he says. “It makes you want to punch people in the face. It’s very confusing.”
But Hawke is never going to lose hope. “We’re going to get it made,” he says firmly. “The question is, are we going to get it made in 6 months, in 18 months, or someday?” Though there are no guarantees in Hollywood, Hawke should be confident. As he, Linklater, and Blue Moon prove, there’s a right time for everything.
About the Author
