Ethan Hawke

Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is an American actor and film director. He has been nominated for numerous accolades, including four Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award. Hawke has directed three feature films, three off-Broadway plays, and a documentary. He has also written three novels and one graphic novel. He made his film debut in Explorers (1985) before making a breakthrough performance in Dead Poets Society (1989). 

Hawke starred alongside Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013). Hawke has received four Academy Award nominations, two for Best Supporting Actor for Training Day (2001) and Boyhood (2014) and the other two for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing Before Sunset and Before Midnight with Linklater and Delpy.

For Hawke's role as the Protestant minister in Paul Schrader's drama First Reformed (2017), he received the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. Other notable roles include Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), Great Expectations (1998), Hamlet (2000), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), Brooklyn's Finest (2009), and Sinister (2012). Maggie's Plan (2015), Born to Be Blue (2015), The Magnificent Seven (2016), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), Juliet, Naked (2018), The Black Phone (2021), and The Northman (2022).

Hawke directed the narrative films Chelsea Walls (2001), The Hottest State (2006), and Blaze (2018), as well as the documentary Seymour: An Introduction (2014). He created, co-wrote, and starred as John Brown in the Showtime limited series The Good Lord Bird (2018) and directed the HBO Max documentary series The Last Movie Stars (2022). He starred as Arthur Harrow in the Marvel television miniseries Moon Knight (2022).

In addition to his film work, 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, Hawke directed Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Director of a Play. In 2018, he starred in the Roundabout Theater Company's revival of Sam Shepard's play True West alongside Paul Dano.

Hawke was born on November 6, 1970, in Austin, Texas, to Leslie (née Green), a charity worker, and James Hawke, an insurance actuary. Hawke's parents were high school sweethearts in Fort Worth, Texas, and married young when Hawke's mother was 17. Hawke was born a year later. Hawke's parents were both students at the University of Texas at Austin at the time of his birth. They separated and later divorced in 1974 when he was four years old.

After the separation, Hawke was raised by his mother. The two relocated several times before settling in New York City, where Hawke attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights. Hawke's mother remarried when he was 10, and the family moved to West Windsor Township, New Jersey. There, Hawke attended the public West Windsor Plainsboro High School (renamed to West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South in 1997). He later transferred to the Hun School of Princeton, a secondary boarding school from which he graduated in 1988.

Hawke aspired to be a writer in high school but developed an interest in acting. He made his stage debut at age 13, in a production at The McCarter Theatre of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. He also performed in West Windsor-Plainsboro High School productions of Meet Me in St. Louis and You Can't Take It with You. At the Hun School, he took acting classes at the McCarter Theatre on the Princeton campus. After graduating from high school, he studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, dropping out after he was cast in Dead Poets Society (1989). He enrolled in New York University's English program for two years but dropped out to pursue other acting roles.