Ethan Hawke Knows You Had A "Reality Bites" Poster In Your Dorm Room
Jan. 22, 2012, 12:36 p.m.
Ethan Hawke, the man of the moment, it seems.
Move over, James Franco and Ryan Gosling—a 1990s heartthrob is trying to usurp your place in the current zeitgeist. Or at least it seems like someone is trying to make Ethan Hawke the man of the moment—did you realize there have been three mentions of Hawke in the NY Times in the past ten days?
Last week, the NY Times praised Ethan Hawke's performance in a new play, Blood From A Stone. Yesterday, the Times movie awards season blog, The CarpetBagger, interviewed Hawke about Reality Bites, because Sundance is screening a "restored" print of the 1994 attempt to capture the essence of Generation X, aided by a crowd-pleasing soundtrack ("Lover's in love and the other's run away").
Asking how close the character of Troy Dyer is to himself, Hawke, twice-nominated for an Oscar, says, "People saw that character as me, and they didn’t like me because of it. I’ve always felt that way. There’s a certain know-it-all-pretentiousness to that character that people think is me that I don’t think is. But it’s O.K. I got typecast; it happened. The moment has passed of me being the Gen X poster boy." He added, "That character got me more attention from girls than anything I’ve ever done in my life. If a woman I don’t know is coming up to me on the train, there’s a good chance she’s going to tell me that she had the poster of ‘Reality Bites’ in her dorm room."
And, today, we get the charming tale of his mother's third marriage, which featured many quotes from Hawke, like, "There’s always something slightly comic about someone talking about how they’re beyond love, and then watching them fall in love. Clearly, despite our best efforts, we’re not as in control of our own lives as we’d like to think," and "I can barely manage my own life, let alone give an opinion on what’s right for her. We’ll see how long the marriage lasts. I’m not saying I have doubts. It’s just that none of us can know the future." In other words, he doesn't know whether there will be a sequel to Before Sunset?
