Ethan Hawke is glad to be stoic again.
Hawke stars in the thriller The Weight as a hard-nosed convict on a mission to reunite with his daughter. In order to gain parole he must transport bricks of gold across a treacherous forest. Despite the turmoil, he remains stoic.
Hawke described his character’s no nonsense personality and moral convictions to the Knockturnal at the red-carpet premiere of the film.
Courtesy of Dave Allocca / Starpix
“Samuel Murphy, my character in this movie, is an old-fashioned stoic hero,” he said. This isn’t Hawke’s first dance with stoicism. He explored the mindset in his 2015 novel Rules for a Knight, which he characterized as “rooted in a lot of stoic philosophy” and likened the protagonists of his book and new film. He then brought up another famous Hawke character who joins the ranks of stoics.
“It’s been kind of since Training Day where I got to play an old-fashioned good guy, like a guy who actually wants to do the right thing,” he said. In that film, Hawke plays a young cop of moral integrity opposite Denzel Washington’s crooked LAPD vet.
Hawke looked to classic stoic heroes he watched in his childhood to frame his performance. The film’s director Padraic McKinley along with producers Simon and Nathan Fields all mentioned the films The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Sorcerer and Deliverance as inspirations for The Weight. The respective leading men of those films – Humphrey Bogart, Roy Scheider, Jon Voight – guided Hawke through his stoic turn as Samuel.
“Those performances, all that you mentioned, are performances I grew up on — first of all. They’re that weird line between being human and iconic,” he said. “Sometimes if you play too much John Wayne you’re just the idea of a man. What Voight and all those other wonderful actors did was kind of embody that shadow figure with a three-dimensional person and that’s what I kind of want to do.”
Courtesy of Dave Allocca / Starpix
The Weight also stary Julia Jones and Russell Crowe and is currently in theaters. Watch the trailer below!
