Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is an American actor, author, and filmmaker whose career on both stage and screen has spanned four decades. Known for his versatility across a range of roles and collaborations with director Richard Linklater, he has worked in both independent films and blockbusters. His accolades include a Daytime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for five Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and a Tony Award.
Hawke made his film debut at age fourteen in Explorers (1985) and gained recognition for starring in Dead Poets Society (1989). He established himself as a leading man with the films Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), and Great Expectations (1998). He received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his roles in the crime thriller Training Day (2001) and coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014); the latter garnered him BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations in the same category. Hawke was Oscar-nominated twice for screenwriting two films from Before trilogy (1995–2013), in which he also starred. He earned Best Actor nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes for portraying lyricist Lorenz Hart in the biopic Blue Moon (2025).
Hawke garnered commercial success with Sinister (2012), The Purge (2013), The Magnificent Seven (2016), and the Black Phone films (2021–2025), and was praised for Maudie (2016) and First Reformed (2017). He directed the films Chelsea Walls (2001), The Hottest State (2006), Blaze (2018), and Wildcat (2023), as well as the documentaries Seymour: An Introduction (2014), The Last Movie Stars (2022), and Highway 99: A Double Album (2025). He portrayed abolitionist John Brown in the miniseries The Good Lord Bird (2020), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, and appeared as Arthur Harrow in the Marvel miniseries Moon Knight (2022).
Hawke has appeared in many theater productions. He made his Broadway debut in 1992 in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2007 for his performance in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia. In 2010, he was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for directing Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind. Divorced from actress Uma Thurman, he has been married to Ryan Shawhughes since 2008; he has two children from each marriage, including actors Maya and Levon Hawke.
Early life
Ethan Green Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, on November 6, 1970. His father, James Hawke, was an insurance actuary, while his mother, Leslie (née Green), was a charity worker and teacher. Hawke's parents were high school sweethearts from Fort Worth, Texas, and married when his mother was seventeen. Hawke was born a year later, while both of his parents were attending the University of Texas in Austin. His parents separated and later divorced in 1974, when he was four years old.
After his parents separated, Hawke was raised by his mother. Hawke often shifted his personality to fit in with different groups of peers that he encountered in their moves. There, he attended West Windsor Plainsboro High School before transferring to the Hun School of Princeton, a boarding school from which he graduated in 1988. Around this time, Hawke volunteered with his mother's organization, the Alex Fund, a charity that supported educational opportunities for underprivileged children in Romania. During his time at the Hun School, he also studied acting at the McCarter Theatre on the Princeton University campus. After graduating, Hawke continued to study acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh but left after being cast in Dead Poets Society (1989). He later enrolled in New York University's English program for two years before leaving to pursue acting full-time. The film received mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box office, leading Hawke to step away from acting for a time. He later described the experience as difficult to handle at such a young age, remarking, "I would never recommend that a kid act". The film was critically and commercially successful and won the BAFTA Award for Best Film. Reflecting on the impact of its success, Hawke later said, "I didn't want to be an actor and I went back to college. But then the film's success was so monumental that I was getting offers to be in such interesting movies and be in such interesting places and it seemed silly to pursue anything else."
In 1991, Hawke co-founded Malaparte, a Manhattan-based theater company that operated until 2000. His first leading role came with Randal Kleiser's film White Fang (1991), an adaptation of Jack London's novel of the same name, in which he portrayed a young Klondike gold prospector who befriends a wolfdog. A writer for The Oregonian appreciated how he kept the film from "being ridiculous or overly sentimental", while Roger Ebert praised how he was "properly callow at the beginning and properly matured at the end"; Hawke himself later called it the "single best experience of my acting life". In A Midnight Clear (1992), his character leads a group of American soldiers during World War II, tasked with capturing a small squad of German troops stationed in the Ardennes forest in France. Hawke made his Broadway debut in 1992, portraying the playwright Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan. He then played Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash in the Andes, in the survival drama Alive (1993), adapted from Piers Paul Read's 1974 non-fiction book.
1994–2000: Established leading man
thumb|upright|[[Before Sunrise (1995) marked the first of Hawke's nine film collaborations with director Richard Linklater (pictured).|alt=Linklater, neutrally looking at the camera]]
In 1993, actress Winona Ryder offered Hawke a leading role in Ben Stiller's Generation X drama Reality Bites (1994). Hawke was reluctant to accept the offer due to his dislike of the characters, but he reconsidered it because he admired Ryder and appreciated the script. The film grossed $41 million on a budget of $11 million and later became a cult classic; of Hawke's performance, Owen Gleiberman said he had "suddenly grown up into a magnetic performer". With Reality Bites, Hawke attained celebrity status and became known as an alternative heartthrob, a perception fueled by his blue eyes, well-defined jaw, goatee, and tousled hair. His portrayal of a disillusioned musician in the film led to him being strongly associated with the character and deemed the poster boy of Generation X, The first installment of the Before film trilogy, Before Sunrise follows an American man (Hawke) and a French woman (Delpy) who meet on a train and disembark together in Vienna. The Hollywood Reporter retrospectively called it "one of cinema's most sustained explorations of love and the passage of time".
Hawke directed the music video for Lisa Loeb's US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single "Stay (I Missed You)"; Loeb was then a member of Hawke's theater company. Spin magazine named the video its Video of the Year in 1994. Hawke appeared in a 1995 production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, directed by Gary Sinise at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. In 1996 he published his first novel, titled The Hottest State, which tells the story of a love affair between a young actor and a singer. He described writing the book as both the "scariest [... but also] one of the best things I ever did." The New York Times thought Hawke did "a fine job of showing what it's like to be young and full of confusion", concluding The Hottest State was ultimately "a sweet love story".