After his daughter Maya Hawke claimed some filmmakers are making casting decisions based on actors’ social media followings, Ethan Hawke is calling hiring talent based on Instagram fans “crazy.”
Earlier this month, Maya went viral when she appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and said that she was told that the number of people following an actor — or lack thereof — could impact whether a film project got made.
“I’m talking about how I’m gonna delete my Instagram and (some filmmakers are) like, ‘Just so you know, when I’m casting a movie with some producers, they hand me a sheet with the amount of collective followers I have to get of the cast that I cast,’” she recalled. “‘So if you delete your Instagram and I lose those followers, understand these are the kinds of people I need to cast around you’ … It’s a really confusing line to walk.”
Maya, whose mother is actress Uma Thurman, said that “the line between actor and celebrity has gotten extremely blurry.”
“I think in some ways a celebrity is someone where their personality is what is the draw. And what I always wanted to be was an actor where the work is what the draw is, not the personhood. But the industry keeps changing and you have to change with it and understand that all of these things are getting blurred,” the Stranger Things star said.
When her dad was attending the Berlin Film Festival this week to promote Blue Moon, his latest collaboration with Richard Linklater, Ethan told reporters that he meets “so many young actors” who think they can have a career by drinking protein shakes and going to the gym.
“I really feel for these people. It’s really hard,” he said, according to Variety. “Sometimes I’ll be setting a movie up and someone will say, ‘Oh, you should cast Suzie.’ I’m like, ‘Who is she?’ ‘She has 10 million followers.’ I’m like, ‘OK cool, has she acted before?’ ‘No, but…’ And you’re like, ‘Wow, so this is going to help me get the movie made? This is crazy.’”
The four-time Oscar nominee that recalled his confusion when confronted by the news that acting careers could be affected by follower counts on social media.
“So if I don’t have this public-facing (platform), I don’t have a career? And if I get more followers I might get that part? What?” he said.
“I wish they could meet (Philip Seymour) Hoffman like I did when I was 18, because it’s a much more substantive and enjoyable life,” he continued. “I mean, go to the gym if you want to, but that doesn’t make you — Robert De Niro is not great because he has a six-pack. If the part calls for it, he’ll do it, and that’s awesome. But he’s so much more than that.”
But Ethan admitted that he does use Instagram and his daughter has lent him a hand with his own social media posts.
“She’s like, ‘Dad, you need an Instagram account… That was a terrible post, Dad, get rid of it,’” he said. “But she’s an artist, my daughter. You can’t stop her. She’s always creative: painting, singing, writing music, acting. I don’t worry about her, she’ll figure that out. But I learn a lot from her now.”
During one of his many interviews with Postmedia, Ethan has opened up about his career, which stretches back to the 1980s when he first appeared opposite the late River Phoenix in 1985’s Explorers.
“Sometimes I feel like a cat,” he said. “I’m just trying to stay alive… It’s like being a spider or something, you do one thing at a time and you look back and there’s a web there and you try not to get stepped on… and it takes practice.”
Acting in a variety of different projects is what helped him be ready when bigger roles came along.
“I’ll never forget when the Yankees were playing Oakland (in the 2001 American League Division Series) and Derek Jeter made the flip play that changed the whole course of that series… New York ended up winning the series and going to the World Series… My grandfather called it the greatest defensive play he’d ever seen. But the point is; he was at the right place at the right time because he went to practice,” he said.