Ethan Hawke called celebrity a “poison” for a young actor’s brain.
The actor, 55, sat down for the Joe Rogan Experience to talk about his start in Hollywood as a young man, as well as to reflect on the psychological effect of becoming famous at a young age.
“I think celebrity is like a tiny drop of mercury. Or its poison. It’s poison for your brain,” the actor said.
Hawke got his first taste of acting at age 14, but after his first film didn’t go as he had hoped, he called it quits on his career and went back home to the East Coast to finish high school, and eventually began college – before dropping out when he landed a role in “Dead Poets Society.”
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Hawke reflected on how different his path would have been had he continued acting at age 14 as a child, versus putting it on pause for a few years to regroup and get back his momentum and passion for the art.
They brought up Jodie Foster, who was famous at a very young age, which Hawke says he reads every interview she does because of how young she was when she started acting.
Hawke said it’s great to put kids in a school play, or take singing lessons, or sing in the church choir, versus a child becoming a professional actor.
“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,” Hawke said.
Rogan compared the experience of becoming famous as a child to concrete. If concrete is made incorrectly, with the wrong amount of water or cement, that’s it, he explained. Rogan added that once it dries there is no way to repair or fix it.
“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. And I agree with you, like I think celebrity is like a tiny drop of mercury. Or it’s a poison. It’s a poison for your brain,” Hawke said.
“Now if you’re mature, you can handle it. And if you get it [celebrity] in slow – like I got in slow increments, ‘Dead Poets Society’ happened. And I had a little taste of fame, but I wasn’t…. nobody knew my name,” the actor said.
Rogan stated: “You go to restaurants…,” to which he said, “Yeah, I was that kid from ‘Dead Poet Society.’ Oh, look at him, yeah.”
“It came so slowly for me,” he said of fame.
Hawke recalled how two days before “Pretty Woman” came out, no one knew who Julia Roberts was, but two days after it came out, she was the most famous woman in America.
“I think that’s a huge thing to absorb, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I’ve worked hard to handle it as poorly or well as I have,” Hawke reflected.
Rogan pointed out that him going back to school and growing up, and going back to acting as an adult was critical.
Hawke said he worked really hard at a theater company after, because he had a desire to show his mom that he was taking responsibility for his own education, noting she was still upset he quit college.
He said at the time, he met a lot of young actors with the same passion for acting — and, like him, were not getting paid while working for the theater company.
Hawke detailed how he ended up as an actor.
He said at age 12 he didn’t have a winter sport, and his mom “didn’t know what to do with me.”
Hawke recalled that his neighbor was taking an acting class at the Paul Robeson Center of Performing Arts [in New Jersey], and his mom signed him up, and he carpooled with the neighbor to take classes.
There was a person named Nagel Jackson, who was head of a local theater company teaching improv, and afterwards, he asked Hawke if he wanted to be part of a play where he would play a character that had a sword as a prop. He only had one line.
It was George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan at McCarter Theatre in New Jersey.
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“It was an incredible experience. To be honest, 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 go home til 7:30 pm. something she would leave at dawn. And she was just miserable at work,” he said.
Hawke said that he went to the rehearsal, and saw people were talking about what they believed in, rocking bold outfits and that they appeared happy onstage. He said the play garnered a standing ovation — and that it was overall, an incredible experience for him – to see people love what they do.
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“It was so much fun. It was the first time I saw 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 still 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 about, and how could this scene fit in with the larger context,” he said.
“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,” Hawke noted.
He recalled that, through a friend, he heard about open casting calls in New York, and he asked his mom if he could go to some auditions if he paid for the train ride into the city himself.
He took Polaroids and went on a couple of auditions, and ended up landing one in 1984. He starred in a $30 million dollar movie directed by Joe Dante called “Explorers,” opposite River Phoenix.
“I thought I was a made man. It was absolutely incredible to be sucked out of suburban America and brought to L.A. My first scene partner was River Phoenix. And all of a sudden, I’m in LA,” Hawke said.
Since his mom couldn’t quit his job, he ended up going to LA with his grandmother as his guardian — who had a strained relationship with his mom.
He recalled that they got to Paramount Studios, and said it looked like “the image from ‘The Godfather’ and you had the big gates.”
His grandmother, who hailed from Fort Worth, wanted to be a movie star, and he said he remembers they were in a big van driving to set for the first day of filming while she was smoking in the van.
“My first time in Hollywood as a f—-n guardian,” he recalled she said as she smoked beside him on the drive-in.
Hawke called the whole “child actor thing” a “trip.”
He said he and Phoenix grew up a lot from when they shot the movie to when it came out, and they went to the bathroom at the premiere and no one recognized them.
“They were all talking about what a turkey the movie was, how terrible it was. And I remember just looking in the eyes, like it wasn’t the narrative we thought. You know we had bought into the dream that we were going to be whatever teen icon we were thinking at the time. And it died a quick and salty death – my dream. I went back to high school and put away my dream of becoming an actor,” Hawke said.
“It was almost like, choose your own adventure book or something. Where I got to see what Hollywood was like, but then have it denied. And kind of like putting your hand in a flame. It was not a good feeling when it was over. And then four years or so went by, and I graduated high school, and I was off to college and I heard about these auditions for a movie called ‘Dead Poets Society.’ And I hated college,” the actor reflected.
“I was miserable, and I thought I’ll take the bus in, and I’ll go on one of these open casting calls again. And if I get the part, I’ll do that. And if I don’t get the part, I’ll join the Merchant Marines and be like Jack London. That was my fantasy at the time,” he said. “I remember calling my sister and saying, ‘Alright, there’s seven parts.’ This is how dumb I was. I was like, there’s seven parts. If I don’t get one of those, I must suck.”
Hawke ended up landing the role of Todd Anderson in “Dead Poets Society,” and dropped out of college.
“The success of ‘Dead Poets Society’ shot me down a different course of water than I was on before,” Hawke said.
When Rogan pointed out that it was probably for the best, he didn’t hit stardom with his first role – and instead, a few years later after he graduated from high school.
“I cannot tell you how grateful I am for the first experience. First of all, if for no other reason than in the success of ‘Dead Poets Society,’ I didn’t take it seriously at all. I didn’t even realize that the movie was successful, until a couple of years later, because I had braced myself for failure – you know the perception of failure anyway,” Hawke explained, to which Rogan asked him: “Because of the first experience?”
“Yeah, because everybody’s saying, ‘Oh this movie is so great.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, they said this last time [referring to ’Explorers’].’ This doesn’t mean anything,” the actor said.
“It kind of taught me at a really young age to ask yourself why you’re doing something. Are you doing it for the result of what happens or are you doing it to do it? And by coming back to acting a few years later, I was just fully braced for it to not go well, and it was still going to be worth it,” Hawke said.
“And so I think it gave me a slight ballast to handle the success of ‘Dead Poets,’” he added.
Rogan chimed in noting, “…Went into it for the enjoyment of doing it, rather than thinking you’re going to be a star.”
“I had no expectations, but I was certain I wasn’t going to be a star. I was positive of it. I saw it as a way to make some money and maybe learn about writing, and learn about film, and a way to get out of college,” the star said.
Hawke explained that the young men also cast in “Dead Poets Society” loved acting, and that they had a “light” in their eyes when they talked about movies.
He would go and watch movies with them, and then go on set to work with Hollywood greats like Robin Williams, with director Peter Weir there, talking about “acting and performance in a way that” he hadn’t thought.
“He talked about it like we were making art and like we were on a mission beyond success or failure, and it was an invitation to a lifestyle, a life commitment,” he reflected, noting that it reminded him of the actors he starred alongside in the play at age 12.
“What I didn’t realize at that time, that’s what that movie’s about too. So the movie itself is a guided meditation on carpe diem right, it’s a meditation on ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may… I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world,” Hawke said, quoting poets Robert Herrick and Walt Whitman.
“I wouldn’t have told you that on the day I wrapped ‘Dead Poets Society,’ that my life had changed, but looking back it had,” Hawke said.
