He’s Only Playing a Wimp

For Ethan Hawke, acting in “Dead Poets Society” and sharing a floor of a Delaware hotel with six other young actors felt a bit like going off to camp.

“All of us got along so well,” the 19-year-old Hawke says. “A lot of times when young actors get together, it turns into this incredible competition, but (director Peter) Weir didn’t let that happen. . . . It really did seem like such an ensemble thing. Nothing anybody did would have been as good without one of the guys.”

The Texas-born Hawke plays painfully shy Todd Anderson in the critically acclaimed film about a charismatic English teacher who inspires a group of prep school students to appreciate poetry. In the role he has several opportunities to exercise his acting talents, honed while performing in high school and regional theater productions in Princeton, N.J., where he lives with his family.

Hawke worked on one other film--”The Explorers”--back when he was 13. In the eighth grade he took “an acting class just for fun, like tons of kids do” and then decided to act in a play because “there was nothing to do that spring.”

He was promptly hooked. “I’m an incredible show-off and I’m not that great at sports,” he says.

Outgoing and handsome, Hawke seems a far cry from the tentative, troubled youth he portrayed. He says that, after a day of shooting, he felt a need to shake off the shackles of the ultra-reserved Anderson.

“I felt like beating someone up or yelling, ‘Hey, I’m not that much of a wimp!’ ”

Hawke, who enrolled at Carnegie Mellon Institute but has been too busy starring in films to attend much, is in Los Angeles shooting a film entitled “Dad,” which stars Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson.

“It’s such a rush to be a part of films that are saying something,” he says. “I just feel so lucky.”