Ethan Hawke on ‘Blue Moon,’ career anxieties and selling out

Ethan Hawke, who at 55 has earned his third acting Oscar nomination for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, reflected on a decades-long career that includes Reality Bites, Training Day and a nine-film collaboration with Linklater that features Boyhood and the Before Sunrise trilogy.

He compared the end of a career to athletes’ retirement press conferences, calling them “sad and moving” and likening the loss of purpose to a kind of personal funeral. In Blue Moon Hawke plays the lyricist Lorenz Hart over one booze-soaked night in 1943, as Hart confronts the collapse of his partnership with Richard Rodgers and the rise of Rodgers’s collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II.

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