Ethan Hawke on the Lasting Legacy of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: “To Be Original Is to Be Yourself”

For Ethan Hawke, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were towering figures within the acting community — accomplished performers who not only took their craft seriously, but also supported the works of other artists in their field. But when he embarked on his five-part HBO/Max documentary series The Last Movie Stars, Hawke began to realize that his project was not just about celebrities often caught in the limelight — it was their private lives and their 50-year marriage that made the most impact. Hawke spoke with THR about why he approached his larger-than-life subjects as spouses first and celebrities second to avoid telling the fairy-tale version of the couple’s lives, careers and lasting legacy.

Do you recall when you first knew who Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were?

People say they have their feel-good dinner or whatever; whenever I was depressed or feeling lost in my life, going back to Cool Hand Luke would always put me in a great place. When I was falling in love with acting and moved to New York City, he was here in the city. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the two of them presided over New York City as some kind of guiding light of what a life in the arts could look like. They were supporting theater and dance companies, she was directing and running the theater company up in Connecticut. It did show that it can be done: You can be a great artist and not be a lunatic and live a meaningful life. They were a big imprint on my 25-year-old self.

How did the series get started?

Like a lot of things in life, it developed slowly. [Paul and Joanne’s older daughter] Nell Newman and I had gone to the same high school. We didn’t know each other there; she was a couple of years older than me. This is probably the real answer to your first question: I saw them on my high school campus, and it rattled my brain that they walked the earth. Nell called me and said, “I really think somebody should do a movie about Mom and Dad.” She thought that another artist, particularly an actor, should make a movie about them. That was compelling, but I still didn’t think I should do it — it seemed like a big responsibility. I kept recommending other people to her, and she said, “I think you would do it better.” I finally just said yes. But then as I started, I realized that I couldn’t make a feature-length documentary about the two of them — their lives were too big. So, I tricked myself into thinking I was doing a two-hour film. I sent a five-hour cut to Richard Linklater and asked him how to get two hours out of it. He said, “You’ve got to add more. You left out this and this and this!”

Did you have to talk their kids into a warts-and-all approach to their parents’ lives?

The first thing I said to them was that I don’t find fairy tales that interesting. There’s the old expression that without shadow, there’s no light; I find [their true love story] more beautiful than the myth, because it involves a lot more work and a lot more agency. Sometimes when we see couples that are happily married for 50 years, you think, “God just likes them better. They’ve got magic dust in their life.” It’s really not the case with them. They worked really hard on developing their love, figuring out what love and what forgiveness means. These big themes of grace, maturity, forgiveness — these are aspects of the self that need to be developed if you’re going to keep growing up. I started realizing, “Wow, this movie is about how to grow up, but it’s disguised as a Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward doc.”

As an actor looking at another actor’s career, was that a weird experience at all?

I was making a documentary about two people who took the same vow [as I did]. The actor’s vow is that it’s calling to a trade, to a craft, to a life-and-death endeavor. I realized that if you don’t understand that vow, you don’t really understand their lives, what performers go through, what they’re trying to do. Why do they want to go onstage? Why do they want to go through all these ups and downs? Why is it valuable to them to put something beautiful onscreen? What does that mean to them? And then, obviously, what does it mean to me? I felt like I had a guardian angel, because it was the perfect medicine for an actor looking at 50.

The film has conversations between you and many of the actors you cast to voice excerpts of memoirs and interviews with Newman, Woodward and some of the figures in their lives. You talk about your jobs as actors in a very grounded way — it’s not all Hollywood glamour.

The only way to be original is to be yourself, right? As soon as you try to be original, you’re being a little fake. I had to trust what was naturally interesting to me. And I’m allergic to iconography. I’ve watched so many people be hero-worshiped, only to fall tumbling back to mankind. I’ve watched the heat of the spotlight make people find room temperature ice-cold. I’ve seen the negative aspects of goosing the truth. I showed my mother an early cut and she said, “The funniest thing to me [is that] you’ve managed to make two people that I wildly admired and looked up to seem just like you and me.”

It’s funny you say that: My mom has been a huge Newman fan ever since she first saw him onscreen. She told me this doc was the first confirmation for her that he and Woodward began their relationship while he was still married to his first wife. Did you feel like you were breaking down a myth about their love story?

We live in a scandal-obsessed society. Paul and Joanne worked very hard to avoid a public scandal. Inside the house, everybody knew what was going on. That humanness of it is really beautiful. This is a guy who comes back from the war, goes into summer stock, falls in love with the first woman he meets, marries her 18 months later, and then they’ve got two kids by the time he’s 24. That’s a lot of pressure on a young couple who didn’t really know each other. And then he meets Joanne Woodward, the love of his life. What’s he supposed to do, live a quiet life of desperation and not hurt his children? It’s a terrible choice to have to make. They followed their love. And they worked really, really hard to try to heal the damage they created. The reality of that is something that we can learn from — whereas the myth of Paul and Joanne riding off into the sunset because they’re perfect people, that’s not useful to anybody.

How did you pick the actors to voice Newman, Woodward and others? I have a feeling many were friends or people you’ve worked with.

One of the blessings of being 50 is that I’ve been working for over 30 years in this profession — I know a lot of people. (Laughs.) I basically thought of people that I most wanted to talk to about that person. Linklater is a giant Scorsese acolyte, and I thought, “If I’ve got to talk about The Color of Money, I need to talk to Rick.” LaTanya Richardson Jackson is an actor who worked with Joanne, and she has a husband [Samuel L. Jackson] who’s really famous. I knew that she would say something great [as Woodward’s aunt, Maude Brink]. Who could play Paul Newman? The obvious person is George Clooney. There are very few people who have stayed at that level of excellence that have the same kind of swagger, the political interest, the insight and understanding of Paul’s experience on this planet — but George would. And I got surprised all the time. Zoe Kazan’s honesty, for example, of saying [when approached to voice Newman’s first wife, Jackie Witte]: “I have to admit, I don’t know who Joanne Woodward is.” That’s true for a lot of people. And that gets into the sexism of our industry, which movies are celebrated and who gets turned into an icon — and who doesn’t.

Are you concerned about what’s celebrated today? Is that part of the industry’s evolution, or have we changed the way we consume media?

The people that control the money on this planet learned very quickly how much money could be made off entertainment. And it’s a lot of money — big business has usurped the art form of cinema. When I think about the films that would get celebrated when I was younger, I wonder: Is there a place for Éric Rohmer today? Would Wings of Desire come out? Would Paris, Texas find an audience? It’s very difficult for artistic achievement in cinema to be in lockstep with commercial wants and desires. I would have thought that films would have gotten more expressionistic, more artistic, more avant-garde. But because it’s so relaxing to turn your brain off and let a movie do all the work for you, we’re getting more and more of that. There’s a quote I love from Flannery O’Connor: “I’d rather have one reader in 100 years than a million today.”

Streaming is a double-edged sword. So much is available to us, but it’s overwhelming. And no one seems to know if anything is a success.

We’ve lost the curators. I’ve spent hours of my life watching things that have absolutely no interest to me. Or, when it’s right there on your television set, you can turn something off in 20 minutes if you don’t like it. I’m leaving out the obvious ways in which it’s better — all of this stuff is readily available, but we’ve lost something. Revival movie theaters curated for their audiences. When I was younger and wanted to see a movie, I had to leave my home to find it. I was forced to engage in a higher conversation. And I do miss that. We need curators to tell us, “Hey, check this out.”

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in a May stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.