Ethan Hawke talks about his upcoming villains in The Black Phone, Moon Knight

Ethan Hawke happens to be in two of the entertainment pieces I’m most looking forward to watching this year: Scott Derrickson’s horror movie The Black Phone, based on a story by Joe Hill (it’s in his collection 20th Century Ghosts, which you can buy HERE), and the Marvel / Disney+ series Moon Knight… and he happens to be playing villains in both of them. This marks a career shift for Hawke, who admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he has previously been hesitant to play villains:

I’ve always had this theory that when you teach an audience how to see the demon inside you, they don’t unsee it for the rest of your career. Jack Nicholson can be playing an accountant and you’re still waiting for him to explode like he did in The Shining. But I realized I’m on the other side of 50 and it’s time to put a new tool in the tool kit. Villains might be my future.”

The Black Phone is set in the 1970s and stars Mason Thames as 

Finney Shaw, a shy but clever 13-year-old boy, who is abducted by a sadistic killer and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of little use. When a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer’s previous victims. And they are dead set on making sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to Finney.

Talking specifically about his role as killer known as The Grabber in The Black Phone, where he wears masks designed by Tom Savini throughout, Hawke said,

Scott wanted me to do a part in a mask for an entire film, and all of a sudden I feel like I’m doing Greek drama; he allowed me to give a performance in the middle of a horror movie. There’s a great Bob Dylan line in that Scorsese doc [Rolling Thunder Revue] where he says that if somebody’s got a mask on, you know they’re telling the truth — and if they don’t have a mask on, you know they’re lying. That was on top of my brain; the scariest thing about [the Grabber] is that he doesn’t want you to see him.”

Hawke went on to say that he drew inspiration from the likes of Carl Jung and David Koresh for his performance as the mysterious villain in Moon Knight.

The uber-rich villain mastermind isn’t interesting to me. I love the ones who believe that they’re a good person and that’s why they have to kill you. That I find really terrifying.”

Moon Knight will consist of six episodes, four of which were directed by Mohamed Diab (Cairo 678), with the directing duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Synchronic) directing the other two. The show has the following synopsis:

When Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life, he discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt. 

Entertainment Weekly describes this as the beginning of the villain era of Hawke’s career, but don’t expect to see him playing murderers and madmen all the time from here on out. He told them,

I doubt I’m going to be the Vincent Price of my generation. I think my interest in weird art films is too high. I’m proud of not being held to one kind of movie. I’ve learned that you can never anticipate how your career is going to unfold for people.”

The Black Phone was originally expected to reach screens before Moon Knight, but the film was recently pushed back to a June 24, 2022 release date, so we’ll see Moon Knight play out first. That show begins airing on Disney+ as of March 30th.