Ethan Hawke on working with Canada Goose, exploring yourself through clothing, and coffee with Bobby Cannavale
The star of brandâs the newest campaign fills us in on staying warm on set and keeping in touch with like-minded colleagues
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ETHAN HAWKE isnât the kind of guy who keeps a close eye on the stuff making its way down the catwalk in Europe. Just the opposite, in fact. âIâve never had any awareness whatsoever of fashion,â he says. âBut practical clothes that look cool, I love.â
Canada Goose built its reputation on practicality and functionality. Thatâs why itâs long been the on-set go-to for movies filmed in the cold or the wilderness. âThere were years where, when people wanted to do a movie that took place in the snow, for some reason they cast me,â he says. One of those movies was Alive. Each morning, Hawke would take a helicopter to a glacier to film the story of a Uruguayan rugby teamâs struggle to survive after crash-landing in the Andes. Thatâs where he was handed his first Canada Goose jacket â one he still has to this day.
Itâs not exactly shocking, then, that the 54-year-old actor would eventually wind up working with the brand directly. He recently made his debut as the star of the campaign for Snow Goose by Canada Goose, the seasonal collection helmed by fashion designer Haider Ackermann, who joined the company as its first creative director in May of this year. (As part of the partnership, Canada Goose is donating $100,000 on Hawkeâs behalf to Tapiriit Kanatami; the funds will assist in the building of Inuit Nunangat University.)
âThe whole thing seemed interesting to me,â Hawke says. âThe direction they were taking their organisation and what theyâre working on. And we came up with a plan to try to celebrate their new line and make it look good in the world.â
To mark the occasion, Hawke and I hopped on an intra-Brooklyn phone call â âoh, so weâre both staring at the same sky,â he quipped when I told him where I was dialling in from â to talk about the campaign, his morning meetups with fellow actors and friends like Bobby Cannavale, and whatâs next for him on the acting front. Read on for a few highlights from our conversation.
On filming in the snow
âI was in White Fang and Alive and Snow Falling on Cedars and A Midnight Clear. There was a period of my life where it seemed that all filmmaking took place near or around glaciers. I think thatâs when my awareness of [Canada Goose] started. When we did Alive, for example, we would take a helicopter every morning to a giant glacier. It was really one of the more intense film shoots of my life, and I learned everything about cold-weather gear. We got handed a Canada Goose jacket on that set that I still have.â
On holding on to his clothes
âI border on a hoarder. Anything I find that I like, Iâll wear until it absolutely dies. My kids make fun of me. I mean, I have T-shirts [seen in] paparazzi photos from me from the â90s, and Iâm still wearing them.â
On consistency
âWhen I was a young actor, one of the first times I got to L.A., I had an audition for a part I didnât get with Warren Beatty. I remember him talking about the value of consistency: If you are consistent with what you actually love, you will go in and out of style, but at least time will reflect well on you that you werenât shape-shifting to the fads. Youâre going to do just as well by being true to yourself as you would by trying to chase any kind of popularity. I always thought that was great advice.â
On dressing for a role
âItâs a fascinating experiment to force yourself to wear other charactersâ clothes and realize how the way that you dress impacts your self-esteem and your awareness of yourself and your identity. As a species, weâre so judgmental about what people look like and what that telegraphs and communicates about who somebody is, and you realise by playing all these different characters how incredibly flexible that is and what a faulty line of judgment it really is, and how you can actually feel good in lots of different kinds of clothes.
âThere are clothes you want to burn when you finish the character. On the other hand, when I did the film Gattaca, I wished I had the energy to dress like that my whole life. The design for that movie was so clean and elegant and classy, and itâs just beautiful. From the sets to the costumes, the design element of that movie really taught me, Wow, I would love to move through the world like this. It just requires a tremendous amount of effort.
âAnd then thereâs other cases. I did this movie, Before the Devil Knows Youâre Dead, and I just played a real schlep. Poor guy was so sad, a loser, and something about the outfits just telegraphed it, and I couldnât wait for that job to be over. You really start to relate to this sad dog of a human being, and you canât wait to shed their skin.â
On his morning meetups with Bobby Cannavale and a few other Brooklyn-based actors
âThereâs a little Screen Actors Guild union meeting at various coffee shops in Brooklyn in the morning. Itâs been a wonderful decade or so. It sounds corny, maybe. But when youâre in the arts and you feel like youâre a cat just trying to stay alive and keep working, itâs fun to meet other people who do the same thing and see them in their daily life. I mean, how they make their decisions, what theyâre eating, what theyâre thinking about. We have a great community, and it all revolves around coffee.
âJust yesterday I was walking my dogs and watching some kids play basketball and Bobby walked by with his kids and we talked for half an hour there and nobody bothered us. I donât know if itâs because we lived here so long, but for example, I went to shoot in Toronto last week and I couldnât walk down the street. I canât quite figure out why that is, except for that people in New York are over it.â
On The Sensitive Kind getting green-lit as a series â and whatâs next
âI love it. Itâs Sterlin Harjo. I donât know if people have seen Reservation Dogs, but for those who have, there was something about it. It felt … just the kind of filmmaking I absolutely love. It was authentic and serious and funny and unpretentious and about real people and about characters. It really gave me a shot of adrenaline watching it, that the landscape of television could be a place where you could really make something new, that it doesnât have to be corporate, and that you can make something beautiful in the midst of all this, and Sterlin and that whole team really did it. I went down there and I had a cameo in I guess the penultimate episode or whatever and had one of the best times on a film set Iâve had in years.
âThat whole community, they were having so much fun and they were making something they really believed in. I really wanted to work with Sterlin, and we started dreaming about this show, and now itâs happening. For me, itâs interesting; Iâm 54 years old and Iâve never done this. Iâve never made a show, and so Iâm making it with somebody I really admire and it has something to say. Iâm really excited about it. Weâre going down to Tulsa beginning of the year and going to try to come out with something worth watching.
âThereâs also this movie, Blue Moon, with Bobby and directed by Richard Linklater that will come out next year. Iâm pretty excited about that, too.â
A version of this story originally appeared on Esquire US.
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