Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2425 - Ethan Hawke
Uploaded: 2025-12-11T18:01:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2425 - Ethan Hawke' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2425 - Ethan Hawke' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2425 - Ethan Hawke

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
nice to meet you great to meet you man it's weird when you've seen someone in
so many
fucking movies and then you meet him in real life like okay just a regular
person right there yeah
staring me in the face he just took a leak yeah um dude you've been in some banger
movies man
it's like you've had an incredible career yeah pull that sucker uh yeah you
pull it
towards me yeah all right very good yeah it's been a long strange trip it's
been a wild one huh yeah
when did you start acting how old were you all right so i'm like 12 years old i
don't have a
winter sport my mother doesn't know what to do with me and uh my next door
neighbor he lived like
four houses down he took an acting class at the paul robeson center of
performing arts and so my mother
signed me up so that i could get picked up by his mom you know taken to acting
class in the winter
and get dropped off you know and be at home and i went there and this head of a
local theater company
came by to teach an improv seminar kind of thing i'm 12 years old right and
afterwards in the parking
lot he said um hey you want to be in a play i said what do you mean he says i
got a part of a guy who's
a knight he gets to you get to have a sword and i said well i have any lines he
said you'll have one
line i said all right cool and i asked my mom and she said do i have to pay you
know and i said i don't
think so i think they're gonna pay me so i went and i did this play and it was
george bernard shaw's
st joan at the mccarter theater in new jersey and that's a real play yeah it
was it was a proper play
and it was an incredible experience to be honest with you because my parents
hated their jobs you
know they would go to work and their life happened on the periphery of their
employment you know my
mom would take the train to new york and so she wouldn't get home till 7 30
something she would leave
at dawn and um the shoes is miserable at work i mean and um i went to this
rehearsal and everyone was
having they were talking about whether or not god existed they were talking
about what they believed
in they would dress up in these crazy outfits and then we did the play and they
got a standing ovation
and it was uh it was so much fun and it was the first time i was like you could
do this for a living
uh you know a lot of the the actors aren't people you've heard of or anything
like that but they
were real actors and they loved their job and the rehearsal room was so kind of
thrilling watching
them figure out where people should stand and when what was important and what
was the scene about
and what was the theme of the play and how could this scene fit in with the
larger context
and um and i just decided that's what i wanted to do and a lot of kids want to
act so that doesn't
mean very much but i through this other friend of mine i started hearing about
open casting calls in
new york and i asked my mom if i could go on some of these big auditions and
again she said does is it
going to cost me any money so if i paid for my own train fare i could go to
these auditions and so
i took some polaroids and uh went on a few of these big auditions and i got one
of them
and it was for this big in 1984 it was a 30 million dollar movie directed by
the guy who just done
gremlins right joe dante and i thought i was a made man i mean it was just it
was engaged it was absolutely
incredible to be sucked out of suburban america and brought to la my first
scene partner was river
phoenix and all of a sudden whoa i'm in la and you know my mom couldn't quit
her job or anything so my
mom had a really turbulent relationship with her mother but her mother her
mother and she didn't
really know each other and so her mother said she'd be my guardian and my mom
designed this as a way to
maybe have a family healing but my grandmother was um a piece of work and uh we
lived together in
koreatown that's what they called it and um it was wild and she i remember we
drove into the paramount
studios you know you can picture it the image from the godfather and you had
the big gates and my
grandmother had always wanted to be a movie star wow you know and she had she
was from here she's
from austin texas well really fort worth but you know she would talk about
going to see gone with the
wind at the paramount here in austin you know and she would she would watch
going with the wind
you know three times a week uh and she had dreamed of being a movie star and i
remember we were in a
big van driving me to set the first day and we went through the gates of paramount
opening up and
she was smoking an eve cigarette in the van of course it's 1984 and she's just
like yeah my first time
in hollywood as a guardian yeah and so the whole child actor thing is was a
trip and i finished the
movie and there's a lot of drama um involved in that if i was to complete that
story but
i finished it the movie was a big turkey how old were you at the time 14. river
and i were both 14. we
yeah but see we look so young in that picture right but you got to understand
you know when you're that
age you think you're dying to be 18 dying to be 16. we went out river and i
stole a pack of camel
cigarettes because we both wanted to be like james dean and um uh and we had a
we had a lot of fun um
that's the truth but the movie came out and i remember river and i going to the
bathroom at the
premiere and um we'd grown a lot from the time we shot the movie to the time it
came out and nobody
in the bathroom really recognized us and they were all talking about what a
turkey the movie was how
terrible it was and i remember just looking in the eyes like it wasn't the
narrative we thought you know
we we'd bought into the dream that you know we were going to be whatever teen
icon we were thinking of
at the time and um and it died a quick and salty death my dream and i went back
to high school and
put away my dream of being an actor it seemed like it was this isolated uh
almost like choose your own
adventure book or something uh where i got to see what hollywood was like but
then have it denied and
it kind of like putting your hand in a flame it was not a good feeling when it
was over and
then you know four years or so went by and i graduated high school and i was
off at college
and i heard about these auditions from a movie called dead poet society and i
hated college i was
miserable and i thought i'll take the bus in and i'll go on one of these open
casting calls again
and and if i get the part this is what i decided if i get the part i'll i'll do
that if i don't get
the part i'll join the merchant marines and be like jack london that was my
fantasy at the time i
remember i remember calling my sister and saying all right there's seven parts
this is how dumb i was
i was like there's seven parts if i don't get one of those i must suck you know
so which is not true at
all but i ended up getting one of them and um and i dropped out of college and
that the success of dead
poet society sent me you know was like a trajectory of it shot me down a
different course of water than
i was on before that's probably a much better path than the first film being
successful and you become
a child star i cannot tell you how grateful i am for that first experience
first of all if for no other
reason than in the success of dead poet society i didn't take it seriously at
all i didn't even
realize that the movie was successful until a couple years later because i had
so braced myself for
failure you know perception of failure anyway because of the first experience
yeah because everybody's
saying oh the movie's so great i'm like yeah they said this last time doesn't
mean anything you know and
so it kind of taught me at a really young age about to ask yourself why you're
doing something
you know like are you doing it for the result of what happens are you doing it
to do it
and i by coming back to acting a few years later i was just fully braced for it
not to go well and it
was still going to be worth it and and so i think i it gave me a slight bit of
ballast to handle
the success of that you went into it for the enjoyment of doing it rather than
thinking i just
hadn't yeah i had no expectations but i was certain i wasn't going to be a star
i was positive of it
i saw it as a way to make some money and maybe learn about writing and learn
about film and
a way to get out of college now what happened is when i got there i met all
these other young men
who were in love with acting and that i started watching movies with them and
talking about movies
with them and seeing the light in their eyes and we'd go to set and there was
robin williams
you know we had peter weir who had just directed witness one of my favorite
movies of all time at
that point and he was a master i mean he was not a lightweight human being he
was a heavyweight human
being and he would lead rehearsals and he would talk about acting and
performance in a way that i
hadn't well you know i heard people talk about it that way when we're doing
saint joan when i was
doing the like he talked about it like we were making art and like we were on a
mission beyond
success or failure and it was it it was an invitation to a lifestyle a life
commitment and what i didn't
realize at the time that's what that movie's about too you know so the movie
itself is a guided
meditation on carpe diem right it's it's a meditation on gather ye rosebuds
while ye may i sound my
barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world you know this is kind of stuff
that i was getting uh
inundated with in rehearsal uh and so that was i didn't i wouldn't have told
you that on the day i
rap dead poet society that my life had changed but looking back it had it
planted the seeds yeah i was
thinking i i've never met a person who became famous at 14 who came out of it
okay um of yet to
i heard jodie foster school never met anybody that became famous very young i
read every
interview she does for exactly that reason um i have it's it's so difficult i
tell parents all the time
like children acting is a wonderful thing put them in the school play it's so
good for them
get them singing lessons it's so good for them singing the church choir it's so
good for them
um but to be a professional actor at a young age is um this it it's dangerous
and in extremely insidious
ways that are very very hard to perceive when it's happening that's a great way
to put it yeah it's it
i think it completely impedes your developmental process and the way i liken to
is like concrete
when you make concrete there's a bunch of very specific ingredients you put
them with very specific
mixture like you have to have this amount of water that amount of sand this
amount of rocks all this
if it's off it's never fixed you can't add water after it's cured it's done it's
fucked forever this is bad concrete now and this is what happens to a lot of
young human beings
that become famous whether it's through acting or singing yeah and it's not
just fame that analogy
works for all walks of life really you know if you have a really uh something
really traumatic
happens in childhood it's very hard to recover it's a tremendous amount of work
to recover and i agree
with you like i think celebrity is like it's like a tiny drop of mercury or it's
poison it's poison for
your brain now if you're mature you can handle it and if you get it in slow
like i got it in slow increments
dead poet society happened i had a little taste of fame but i wasn't nobody
knew my name i was you
go to restaurants yeah i was that kid from dead poet society oh look at him
yeah and i got it in slow
i got to develop what do you what do you call it when you you get a little bit
of poise uh like a
resistance yeah resistance to it um and it it came so slowly for me i even
think about people i remember
the weekend pretty woman came out two days before no one had ever heard of julia
roberts two days
afterwards she's the most famous 