Ethan Hawke Opens Up on River Phoenix’s Impact on His Life: “He Will Always Be a Part of Me”
The veteran actor, in Palm Springs to receive a career achievement award during the Film Awards, said from the stage that he was feeling “incredible reflective” about his life and career.
Following a banner year with back-to-back critically acclaimed performances in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown and Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2, Ethan Hawke headed to the desert to receive a career achievement trophy during the Palm Springs Film Awards Saturday night.
The honor — presented during a starry ceremony inside the Palm Springs Convention Center attended by fellow honorees like Miley Cyrus, Adam Sandler, Timothee Chalamet, Kate Hudson, Michael B. Jordan, Amanda Seyfried and others — had Hawke feeling “incredible reflective” about his long and enviable career. Specifically, it had Hawke thinking about “the people who actually made this career that you’re honoring.”
“I am the consistent element, yes, but there are so many people sewn in to the fabric of it. I never did anything alone,” Hawke said.
As such, he spent the majority of his speech shouting out his many collaborators, beginning with the late River Phoenix with whom he starred in Joe Dante’s Explorers, a 1985 film about a young boy obsessed with 1950s sci-fi movies about aliens. After a recurring dream about a blueprint, he and two pals attempt to build themselves a spaceship.
“I remember being 13. I was staying at a Radisson Hotel up by San Francisco, watching out my window as a 14-year old River Phoenix walked back and forth across the parking lot,” Hawke recalled from the podium following a loving tribute from Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. “I went outside and I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m practicing my character’s walk.’ He auditioned a series of walks for me, and it had never occurred to me to walk any other way but as cool as possible. That’s all I thought about.”
Hawke then opened up on the influence they had on one another during that time, which came in their earliest days in the acting business.
“I talked to him for a while. He’d never read a book. I gave him Catcher in the Rye. I had never listened to punk rock, and he gave me cassettes. I didn’t know what a vegetarian was. He showed me documentaries about slaughterhouses and the damage they were doing to our environment,” Hawke explained of Phoenix who died at age 23 of a drug overdose at the Viper Room in Los Angeles on Halloween night in 1993. “He will always be a part of me.”