Ethan Hawke

Ethan Green Hawke, born November 6, 1970, in Austin, Texas, is an American actor, author, and filmmaker whose work across stage, screen, and literature has extended over four decades. His father, James Hawke, worked as an insurance actuary, and his mother, Leslie (née Green), was a charity worker and teacher. His parents, both Fort Worth natives who married while his mother was seventeen, separated in 1974 when Hawke was four. Raised primarily by his mother, he moved frequently before the family settled in Brooklyn, where he attended the Packer Collegiate Institute. After his mother remarried, the family relocated to West Windsor Township, New Jersey, where Hawke attended West Windsor Plainsboro High School before transferring to the Hun School of Princeton, a boarding school from which he graduated in 1988.

Hawke's interest in performance began early. He made his stage debut at thirteen in a McCarter Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, having studied acting at that theater on the Princeton University campus. He also appeared in high school productions of Meet Me in St. Louis and You Can't Take It with You. After graduating, he studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University before leaving to film Dead Poets Society (1989). He subsequently enrolled in New York University's English program for two years before committing to acting full-time. His first screen appearance came at fourteen in Joe Dante's Explorers (1985), in which he played a misfit schoolboy alongside River Phoenix.

Dead Poets Society marked his breakthrough, and its commercial and critical success, including a BAFTA Award for Best Film, generated significant industry attention. His first leading film role followed in Randal Kleiser's White Fang (1991), an adaptation of Jack London's novel in which he portrayed a young Klondike gold prospector. In 1991, he co-founded Malaparte, a Manhattan-based theater company that operated until 2000. He went on to establish himself as a leading man through Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), and Great Expectations (1998). He received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor for Training Day (2001) and Boyhood (2014), the latter also earning him BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations in the same category. He earned two additional Oscar nominations for co-writing films from the Before trilogy (1995–2013), in which he also starred, and received Best Actor nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes for portraying lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon (2025).

Hawke has also built a substantial body of work in genre and commercial cinema, appearing in Sinister (2012), The Purge (2013), The Magnificent Seven (2016), and the Black Phone films (2021–2025), while earning praise for Maudie (2016) and First Reformed (2017). His television work includes portraying abolitionist John Brown in the miniseries The Good Lord Bird (2020), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination, and playing Arthur Harrow in the Marvel miniseries Moon Knight (2022). As a director, he has made the narrative films Chelsea Walls (2001), The Hottest State (2006), Blaze (2018), and Wildcat (2023), as well as the documentaries Seymour: An Introduction (2014), The Last Movie Stars (2022), and Highway 99: A Double Album (2025). His accolades include a Daytime Emmy Award alongside nominations for five Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and two British Academy Film Awards.

Hawke's Broadway career spans 1992 to 2019. He made his Broadway debut in 1992 portraying the playwright Konstantin Treplev in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Lyceum Theater in Manhattan. He subsequently appeared in True West, Macbeth, and Henry IV, among other productions. His most recognized stage work came with Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, in which he starred in both Part 1 (Voyage) and Part 2 (Shipwreck), earning a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2007. In 2010, he received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Director of a Play for directing Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind.

In his personal life, Hawke was previously married to actress Uma Thurman and has been married to Ryan Shawhughes since 2008. He has two children from each marriage, including actors Maya and Levon Hawke. He also volunteered with his mother's organization, the Alex Fund, a charity supporting educational opportunities for underprivileged children in Romania.