Ethan Hawke Reveals His Most Challenging Role Was Lorenz Hart Biopic

The 55-year-old actor has enjoyed huge success in Hollywood, starring in movies such as 'Dead Poets Society', 'Training Day' and 'Boyhood', but Ethan admits that playing lyricist Lorenz Hart in the biopic was particularly challenging, reports 'Female First UK'.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Ethan said, "There have been a handful (of roles) that have been extremely challenging. It's just one of the few jobs that's used everything I've learned over the years, from the physical stuff, to the vocal work, to the movement work, to the verbiage, to the text, to the ideas that we're trying to communicate. It was not a light lift".

Ethan credited director Richard Linklater with helping him to find his character's "voice". The actor said, "When you become a professional actor, there's a great push to just always stay in the same box. You stop letting yourself play as much, and the play is where really good things happen. So in that way, I love that Rick was giving me a chance to really jump out of the normal sandbox. So I could really find a voice that matched his wit and his energy and his soul, for lack of a better word, and making all that language feel like it was my own".

As per 'Female First UK', Ethan actually worked on his character during a series of workshops over several years, and he enjoyed developing the character with the help of Richard.

He shared, "It really all comes back to my friendship with Linklater. We would just read it and work on it. We would talk about Larry, about the people we know that were like this, or what the film is about, and what do we think he's thinking about that? Then we'd send each other records and be like, 'That's an interesting line, where does that line come from?' And we started kind of seeing the movie as a Rodgers and Hart song, like, 'What if we made a movie that was a 90-minute Rodgers and Hart song?' In a lot of ways, Rick's job was to create the architecture and skeleton and musculature the way that Richard Rodgers would for the song, and my job was the lyrics to sit on top of it and dance and play".

"What's so powerful about their music is that it has all the strength and gravitas and, at the same time, it's completely silly. And when you can be silly and strike a note that's profound, it's a magic trick", he added.

- IANS