Ethan Hawke isn’t losing sleep over whether everyone loves his latest movie — and honestly, he thinks actors need to get used to that.
The Training Day star, 55, opened up during a recent People magazine interview about dealing with wildly different reactions to his work and why having a “backbone” matters when you live in the public eye.
“If you’re going to be in the public sphere, you have to have a backbone,” he said. “You’re not going to please all the people all the time, and every movie isn’t for everybody.”
Hawke knows that firsthand. Over the years, he’s heard everything from passionate praise to brutal reviews from people who watched the exact same film.
“I’ve done some movies that I’ll meet somebody and they will tell me they’ve seen it six times. They love it, and they show their friends, and somebody else will say, ‘Why did you make that movie? It was awful, I turned it off,’ ” he shared. “Neither one is right or wrong. It just wasn’t for them.”
That mindset is serving him well with The Weight, in which Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, a man separated from his daughter and sent to a brutal labor camp in 1933 Oregon.
He later takes on a dangerous gold-smuggling mission in a desperate attempt to get home.
So, is Hawke nervous about audiences finally seeing it? Not really.
“Sometimes you’re jittery if you don’t like the movie because you think, well, maybe other people will, maybe I’m wrong and you’re hoping you’re wrong so you’re jittery about it,” he explained.
“But I know I like this movie, so I’m not nervous.”
For Hawke, the real nerves happen before filming begins.
“I get jitters before I shoot. Is this gonna work? Is this the right set? Is this the right location? Did we make the right decisions? Is this the script really done, or are we ready? Those kinds of things give me the jitters,” he noted.
The Weight is in theaters now.
