Ethan Hawke Biography

Ethan Hawke started out as a leading man for the slacker generation, mixing scruffy whiskers and leather jackets with a certain melancholy dignity. On the big screen, he was the cop being trained by Denzel Washington in 2001’s Training Day.

In the mid-1990s, Hawke starred opposite a bevy of up-and-coming actresses: with Winona Ryder in the slacker landmark Reality Bites (1994), with French star Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater‘s romance Before Sunrise (1995), with Uma Thurman in the futuristic DNA drama Gattaca (1997), and with Gwyneth Paltrow in a modern-era Great Expectations (1998).

Hawke has since appeared dozens of movies, including other Linklater movies such as The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life (2001) and Before Sunset (2004).

He was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in Training Day, and he’s been nominated twice for co-writing, for the films Before Sunset and Before Midnight (2013, both sequels to Before Sunrise).

Hawke’s other films include Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Lord of War (1995, starring Nicolas Cage), Daybreakers (2009), Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood (2014, another Oscar nomination), First Reformed (2017, directed by Paul Schrader) and Juliet, Naked (2018, based on the book by Nick Hornby).