Ethan Hawke, 55, is a girl dad, which shows when he sits down to speak with Sydney Sweeney. At 28, the actor-producer who first broke out on HBO’s “Euphoria” is close in age to Hawke’s oldest daughter, “Stranger Things” star Maya Hawke, and Hawke seems to take beaming pride in Sweeney’s career success — even though they’re meeting for the first time.
Sweeney is the star of “Christy,” a biopic about the boxer Christy Martin, a trailblazer in women’s sports who won fight after fight while suffering life-threatening abuse from her husband-slash-coach. Some parts of Martin’s story — being queer and semi-closeted, struggling with addiction, feeling rejected by people she loved — overlap with that of legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, whom Hawke plays in Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon.” In their conversation, the two gush about the joys of “losing yourself” to a role and Hawke offers Sweeney some lessons he’s learned over his 40-year career.
Ethan Hawke: My 17-year-old has absolutely zero interest in me whatsoever. She texts me, “What are you doing tonight?” Clearly, her friends abandoned her. I was like, “My daughter’s asking me to go to a movie. I’m doing this.” I text her, “What do you wanna see?” And she says, “I wanna see that new Sydney Sweeney movie.” I’m like, “Christy? On it.” I get us tickets to the Alamo. We order a couple Impossible Burgers and we have one of the best nights we’ve had in a long time. She’s like, “This is what you don’t understand. This woman is the best fighter in the United States of America, and it’s still virtually impossible to get out of a toxic relationship. That’s what so many women are up against, Dad.” We had such a great conversation. She wanted me to tell you she’s really glad you told that story. I know you’re a producer on it. How did that come to be?
Sydney Sweeney: I had been circling a few different projects that were in the MMA fighting space.
Hawke: Let’s stop there. Why?
Sweeney: I grew up kickboxing, so I wanted to find something a little more physical. Then my agent was like, “There’s a script going around about Christy Martin. Why don’t you read it?” Halfway through the script — bawling my eyes out. I couldn’t believe that I had no idea who this woman was. I’d never learned about her. The moment I finished, I got on a Zoom with the director [David Michôd], begging him to please let me do this project. I was like, “I will do anything for you. I will lose myself.”
Hawke: The joy is completely losing yourself. Acting, at its best, is not about you at all. It’s a high that I’ve chased my whole life, and it doesn’t happen very often, but you lost yourself in the best way. Was it fun to start training again?
Sweeney: I loved it. I was working out twice a day, every single day. I put on 35 pounds. I came to life. I was like, “I think I might quit acting, and start boxing.”
Hawke: I played Chet Baker in a movie. He’s a great trumpet player. I got so into it that I told my trumpet teacher, “We gotta put this movie off a year. I just wanna play for a year, and then I’ll be able to do it.” And my teacher said, “It’d take a lot longer than a year.”
Sweeney: We convince ourselves we’re so good at these things!
Hawke: That’s the trick. It ultimately doesn’t really matter how good you are. It’s whether you believe. Do you have a favorite sports movie?
Sweeney: I’ve always loved the “Rocky” franchise.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
Hawke: I saw “Rocky” and I decided I wanted to be a boxer. I took boxing lessons. I got one fight — and I didn’t like boxing anymore. I got my ass kicked. I felt like I was a pretty good defensive boxer, but the guy was punching my hands so hard that I was hitting myself. I dropped it. I did not like losing.
Sweeney: How long did you train for this fight?
Hawke: Six months or something. You fared better than I did.
Sweeney: I got a concussion, though.
Hawke: You said that with pride.
Sweeney: I was proud of it. I loved the fighting sequences. We actually took all the fights from Christy’s real life. Every fight that you saw in the movie was the exact combinations that she had in those fights. I told all the stunt girls, “I really want to be hit.” And they were down for me to hit them. We were just going at each other. There were bloody noses. It was real.
Hawke: So you start with training. Then the psychology of her. She’s a really complicated woman. The way she speaks about other women. Her relationship with her mother just broke my heart.
Sweeney: It was day three, Merritt [Wever]’s first day on set, and we had to do the scene where Christy goes to her mom and says, “I need help.” It was one of the hardest scenes I’ve ever had to do. I just could not understand a parent not being able to be there for their kid.
Hawke: Unfortunately, it happens all the time. I had a cab driver on the way from the airport who said, “You know the best thing about my son? He looks just like me.” I said, “That’s not the best thing about your son. It has nothing to do with your son.” So many parents — what I got from that scene — have an agenda of who you are as reflecting them. You are not an independent entity. And she had such an agenda with the woman she wanted you to be that she couldn’t see the woman you are. That happens all the time in our profession. There’s so many parents that don’t want their kids to be performers.
Sweeney: Did you want your daughter [Maya Hawke] to start? How was that?
Hawke: It was without complication. I knew when she was about 4 that she was gonna be an artist. And I knew that she was gonna be a very good one. That was her safe place, watercoloring, dancing, singing all throughout her childhood. There were a lot of things about her childhood that were really, really hard and complicated, and things I regret for her. But anything that had to do with human communication was something she vibrated to. I remember some teacher said, “Maya, are you happy?” ’Cause they were worried about her.’ And she said something to the effect of, “Do you really think that’s the question?” I thought, “I love this kid.” She was about 13. “I don’t think that’s a very interesting question. I think there’s a lot more interesting questions than whether I’m happy or not. Am I happy? No. But I don’t aspire to be happy.” So I never worried about her going into the arts, because I knew that was gonna save her life. How old were you when you started?
Sweeney: 12, 13.
Hawke: So it probably wasn’t much of a choice for you either.
Sweeney: It was just in me. I loved it. People would be like, “What’s your plan B?” I was like, “I don’t have a plan B, ’cause I’m not prepared to fail.”
Hawke: When you have a big part like that, and it takes over your life, and it wraps, how did you feel?
Sweeney: It was this bittersweet emptiness. You’re so proud of the work that you did. It’s a dream role. You just experienced six months of everything you’ve ever wanted. Then everybody gives hugs, kisses and you have to say goodbye to it forever. I remember standing in front of the mirror — I still had the weight — and I was like, “I’ll never get to do something like this ever again.” It made me really sad. I don’t know if I’ve actually navigated the ending of that yet, because we’re still in press. I’m getting to watch the movie all the time. I’m with [real-life] Christy all the time.
Hawke: People always ask, “What was it like to get into character?” Blah, blah, blah. And nobody really talks about how to shed a character. There’s a great Paul Newman interview where he talks about how part of how he grew as a person was taking the qualities that he really admired in the characters that he played, and keeping them. And taking the qualities of the characters that he played that he had no respect for, but now he could see them in himself, and he could try to shed them. Like, “OK, I saw the jealousy; I saw the greed; I saw the malice. I know that’s in me, but I’m gonna try to water that part down.”
Sweeney: Do you carry your characters like that?
Hawke: There’s a handful. Thirteen years from now, people like my daughter Clementine are gonna come up to you and tell you stories about the way that the movie impacted them. It really makes you feel phenomenal. That all is not lost. I did this movie when I was 17, “Dead Poets Society.” And people still come up to me at a deli or something saying, “O Captain! My Captain!”
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
Sweeney: I was completely blown away by your transformation, your performance, everything that you did with “Blue Moon.” I’d love to know your experience.
Hawke: When I was 23 or 24 years old, I auditioned for Richard Linklater and got cast in this movie “Before Sunrise,” and started a friendship that’s over 30 years on now. This is our ninth film together, so he gave me the script over 10 years ago. I was like, “We gotta make this movie.” And he said, “Yeah, we’re gonna make it, but not yet.” I was like, “Wait, let’s make it now.” He goes, “No. You’re not ready. Let’s just keep dreaming about it.” So we’d do a reading and talk about it about every 18 months for almost 10 years. Finally, we did a reading at my kitchen table, and everybody left, and I looked at Rick. And he was like, “We’re ready.” We got the money together. Once I knew it was on, the fear came. I was like, “Wait a second. This is so much verbiage. I need more time.” He said, “We don’t have more time. You gotta work.”
Like Christy, Larry Hart is often two things: I call it the correlation of opposites. If you take an extremely heavy person and they’re a great dancer, you can’t take your eyes off them. It’s when somebody has two things at the same time that seem opposing. Brando is the greatest example. He’s so intensely masculine. He’s also extremely feminine. It creates this tension in everything he does. Larry is the smallest person in the room and the biggest person in the room. He’s gay and he’s in love with a woman. He’s eroding from the inside with jealousy — and warm and empathetic. In any scene, the opposite of what I’m playing is also true.
Sweeney: How did you prep for the immense amount of dialogue that you have?
Hawke: I hand-write everything like it’s my journal. I’m not memorizing from a typewritten page; I don’t want irrelevant stage directions to be part of it. I try to write it from memory, and then I look and see what I got wrong. It also helps me be extremely critical of the writer, in a positive way. “It doesn’t seem like I would use that word four times. I think this is a better word.” Then I record it, and I listen, and I see what I got wrong.
Take Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather.” I know all the lyrics to that song. I don’t know how I know all the lyrics to that song. I absorbed it at coffee shops and on the car radio, and it’s in me now. If you have a really big speech — Jon Voight taught me this — you unlace your shoe. And you have to do the speech lacing your shoe. If I was talking, lacing my shoe, it would be no problem. If I’m trying to remember, then it’s difficult to do.
Sweeney: Do you find more of a love in theater than on screen? Where do you feel more alive?
Hawke: If I’m working with a great film director, that’s my happy place. But really, I like being in the room with talented people. The great thing about plays is the editor doesn’t mess it up. The director doesn’t mess it up. I control whether it goes fast or slow. If I want this scene to be angry, it doesn’t matter what the director says, it’s gonna be angry. They’re not gonna sit in the edit room and change it. That sounds aggressive and hostile, but there’s a great Fran McDormand quote: “I don’t need a great director. I need a good editor.”
Sweeney: It’s so true.
Hawke: Do you have experience onstage? Is that something that interests you?
Sweeney: I have horrible stage fright. Terrible stage fright.
Hawke: You know what that is?
Sweeney: What?
Hawke: Inexperience. If you did it five times, it would go away. Because I’ve seen so much of your work and you’re just an excellent actor. I think you would enjoy it.
Sweeney: I want to come watch you in theater one day.
Hawke: I’ll drag you out. You won’t watch. We’ll put you in.
Sweeney: Oh, man. I might be really nervous the first time.
Hawke: Everybody’s really nervous. That’s the fun of it. When you’re on the other side of it, it’s so rewarding. You must have been terrified to play Christy when it first started. What about television? What’d you learn? What was “Euphoria” like?
Sweeney: “Euphoria” was the beginning of everything for me. Cassie is a very emotional and heart-driven character, so I had to be very free with every choice that I made. I had to not question myself. I had to just dive in, make crazy decisions and not judge what I was doing. And the more I did it — I just wrapped Season 3 — I am so thankful, because I’m not scared to try something, even if it’s completely bonkers. Sam [Levinson] would always go, “All right, let’s just do a Cassie crazy take.” And they were always our favorite takes because we would let all rules go and lose yourself to it.
Hawke: Linklater would say that on “Blue Moon” too. “Why don’t you do one and just do everything you ever thought of doing but were worried it was bad?” Nobody’s gonna see that but the people in the room and the editor, but you might find something. And invariably, you always do.
Sweeney: Especially with Cassie, I always find that those crazy takes — they’re the ones.
Hawke: It’s exciting to see somebody lay it all out there. I really believe this: The world loves it when you take a dare. And you took a dare. You’re throwing yourself at your work, and you’re doing a great job. It’s fun to get to talk to you at this moment in your life.
Sweeney: Man, I wish you were my dad.
This is a conversation from Variety and CNN’s Actors on Actors. To watch the full video, go to CNN’s streaming platform now. Or check out Variety’s YouTube page at 3 p.m. ET today.
Production: Emily Ullrich; Agency: Nevermind Agency
