One Nightstand With Ethan Hawke

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Ethan Hawke’s movie education began with weekend trips to the cinema, with one caveat. “I couldn’t go to the movies on Friday if I hadn’t read a book that was not on the curriculum and I would have to prove that I read it,” he tells me during a live taping of One Nightstand at the Strand Bookstore in New York City. “It’s one of those things I found so irritating as a young person, and now I’m so grateful.”

Hawke’s training — instigated by his mother — paid off. In his four-decade career, the 55-year old actor has hopped deftly between mediums and practices. His work as an actor has earned him three Academy Award nominations, most recently his first Best Actor nod for Blue Moon, which also earned him Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Actor Award noms. He’s also worked extensively on the stage (one Tony nomination) and as a screenwriter (two more Oscar nominations), while racking up credits as a director, producer, and documentarian. He also acquired his mother’s love of books and reading, and has since penned three novels, the fable Rules for a Knight, and the graphic novel Indeh.

The diversity of Hawke’s creative approaches has always been intentional. “It would’ve been OK if I wasn’t a famous actor,” he says. “That wasn’t the goal. The goal was to have a meaningful substantive life in the arts.” Doing so required a certain amount of risk-taking, which began with his decision to go against his mother’s advice and drop out of college to pursue a part in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. “It was very important to me to find myself, and I knew that no one else could do it,” he says of the choice, noting that even when it paid off, he felt he had to make the win count.

“I had made like $28,000 on Dead Poets Society and I thought I was the richest person in the world — I was like, ‘Shit, I’m loaded,’” he recalls. “I took about half of it and I made a short film with the money. It was a way to prove to my mother this thing of like… yeah, you don’t have to go to college, but you have to take responsibility for your own education or you will be an idiot and you’ll be dead.”

Hawke leaned on his intuition then and hasn’t stopped since. “Most of all the trouble that I’ve put myself through in my life has come from not listening to that voice or trying to override that voice,” he says. “A lot of the most creative, successful decisions I’ve made were complete intuition.”

His partnership with director and screenwriter Richard Linklater is one such example. “[Linklater] came to see a play I was in, and we hung out talking all night and I guess I gave him my number,” he recalls of their 1993 meeting. “I pressed play on my answering machine… and then this voice came on, and I had no idea who it was but I knew instantly that this was a really good friend of mine. Then I realized, ’Wait, I don’t know this person. Oh wait, that’s the guy I met the other night.’ I had this really strong feeling that I was going to know him.”

The pair went on to work together in 1995 on the now cult-classic Before Sunrise, though many were unsupportive of his decision to do so. “Everybody in my life was telling me not to do this movie with him — the powers, the agents,” he recalls. “I just remembered that feeling and I was like, ‘No, I’m going to Vienna with that guy.’ I sensed it and I knew it was the right thing to do.”

Hawke returns to screens on Oct. 14 in The Lowdown on FX, Sterlin Harjo’s noir about Lee Raybon, a self-proclaimed Tulsa ‘truthstorian’ and citizen journalist. “I play a bookstore owner, so all the people who work here at The Strand, I feel you,” he says of Raybon, who lives above his used bookstore. “It’s been bringing back in me a desire to have books really be a part of my life and my life is so much richer. I really do feel there are few really great home cure remedies for depression [better] than walking and reading.”

Like his mother, he’s trying to instill reading as a regular habit in his own kids’ lives. “It’s so hard because you want your kids to like you,” he says of enforcing his mother’s strict Friday night rules, but he has had some recent breakthroughs. “I try to instill the passion for them, but it kind of has to take off,” he adds. “I gave my 18-year-old The Razor’s Edge [by W. Somerset Maugham] this summer. I watched her burn through that book with tears in her eyes. Then you’re like, ‘All right, we’re on, We’re on. We got some traction.’”

Keep reading to discover four of Hawke’s favorite books.

His first selection is The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers, a middle-grade book Hawke describes as "if Henry David Thoreau and Woody Allen wrote a children’s book.”

The story follows a free dog named Johannes who serves as the “eyes” for the animal community in a seaside park. For Hawke, the book’s descriptions of nature feel more relevant than ever. “I think culturally, psychologically, in some weird heart place, we’re all hurting for the natural world,” he says. “I think that this question that’s omnipresent in our life about AI is actually asking us this really profound question that most of us don’t want to be asked: What does it mean to be human? Was I born to be efficient? Was that what I was born to do, to make money as quickly as possible? Because a computer can do that better than me.”

After reading the book, Hawke agreed to narrate the full five-hour audiobook. He says one of the perks was getting to interpret the voices of each character. “Some would be people from my real life and some would be like, ‘All right, for the raccoon, I’m going to cast Wally Shawn.’”

His next pick is Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which follows two sisters from a small town in Idaho in the wake of their mother’s suicide. Hawke met Robinson years ago at a book talk in Paris. “It was just so incredibly humbling to meet just an astonishing human being,” he says. “The way that she spoke to the people in the room — she wasn’t trying to entertain like I am. She wasn’t nervous like I am. She was incredibly present. I watched her do a Q&A and I wished that she was the President of the United States.”

Robinson, for her part, was somewhat unfazed by their meeting. “I went up and introduced myself, and she couldn’t have given a sh*t who I was,” he says. “In fact, I think she was slightly annoyed that I thought she was supposed to recognize me. She just couldn’t be bothered with me.”

He’d read her other bestsellers Home and Gilead but picked up a first-edition copy of Housekeeping when he happened upon a used bookstore during press for The Lowdown. “The guy who was working there seemed so broke and sad that I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll buy that for my wife,’” he says. “I thought if a movie actor walks into your bookstore, you should buy something. I don’t want him going around town saying ‘He didn’t buy sh*t.’ I want him to say, ‘He bought a first edition Housekeeping, wow!’”

He did get a chance to read it himself, however. “Have you ever drank way too much and you’re walking to bed and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m hammered. I can’t see straight,’ but there’s some tiny, tiny part way in there that’s sober, that kind of knows what’s happening and going like, ‘Wow, Ethan, you are slurring your words.’?” he says. “That little part of you that is the best part of you. That essence — I don’t even know what the word is — this book touches it.”

His third choice is The Animal Family, a 1965 children’s book written by Randall Jarrell and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It’s hard to come by but hasn’t deterred Hawke from spreading the word. “I could not recommend it more,” he says. “Sometimes if I’m bored or something, I’ll go online and I’ll buy five used copies of this book to give to people as presents.”

Reading the book has become a family affair. “I’ve had two litters, my first two kids and then my second two kids,” he says. “I had this cabin in Nova Scotia and when my first two kids were young, we went up there in the summer, and my wife is the best reader in the world… and she had these voices for what the mermaid sounded like and what the lynx sounded like and the bear. It was just one of those things you just pray for as a parent, where everybody couldn’t wait for dinner to be over so we could read The Animal Family. It was a very magical memory for us.”

He continues: “When the other two kids came along, when they were about the same age, Maya and Levon, my older ones — it was the pandemic and we were trapped in the house — said, ‘Let’s read The Animal Family out loud again.’ So we did the same thing again.”

His final pick is Larry McMurtry’s 800-plus page epic anti-Western Western Lonesome Dove. Hawke says he read it after working with Tommy Lee Jones (co-star of the 1989 TV adaptation) on The Lowdown Season 2.

“We’re in a bookstore because that’s where the set is happening, and there’s a copy of Lonesome Dove there. I just lied… He’s like, ‘God, I love this book so much.’ And then he’s like, ‘A lot of people, they watch the TV show, they think they read the book. The book’s so much better than the TV show.’ And I say, ‘Oh God, I know.’ The lies are flying out of my mouth,” he says. “I have not read Lonesome Dove, and I’m one of the a**holes he’s talking about who saw the show and pretends to read the book. I didn’t feel like confessing to him, but I promised myself. I was like, ‘OK, when this show ends, I’m reading Lonesome Dove.’”

The book was more impactful than he could have imagined. “We were on a family vacation when I finished it. And in front of everybody — they’re all chit chatting and doing a puzzle — I just laid on the floor and wept,” he says. “I didn’t know if I was weeping because of something that happened in the book or because the experience was over… It shook me to my core.”

When Netflix announced plans to produce a new adaptation of Lonesome Dove with the help of upcoming East of Eden showrunners Zoe Kazan and Jeb Stuart, Texas Monthly cast Hawke as their actor for Augustus ‘Gus’ McCrae. “Everybody in my life sent me that post,” he says. “I gotta be so cool. I don’t have any thoughts. I’ll kill somebody if I’m not in there.”

Watch the full episode below: