Playing the anti-movie star

Ethan HAWKE tossed his trucker hat atop the plants in the cafe window and kissed the stunning waitress on both cheeks, French style. It was a Chelsea morning after the first preview of the off-Broadway revival of David Rabe’s 1984 play “Hurlyburly,” and Hawke was absolutely rumpled, the flagrant bed-head definitely not a result of over-styling.

He still smokes. He still looks as he did in his early 20s, somehow both anxious and mellow. The older of his two children is 6, they live with him part time and, although he worked late nights during this week of previews, they woke him very early. And he has a deep groove on his face, a line between his eyes that Julie Delpy pointed to in their 2004 nine-years-later reunion movie, “Before Sunset,” as the mark of the trials of adulthood.

Hawke immediately began snuffling and sneezing. “I snort all this fake cocaine,” he said -- “Hurlyburly” is set in the coke-loving Hollywood of the 1980s, and Hawke surely must work his way through a gram of the stuff (“It’s sugar or something, some sugar substitute,” he said) on stage each night. “My nose is always bleeding. I have to figure it out. As the play goes on I’m sure I’ll snort less of it. But all of a sudden I’m Jay McInerney.” He cracked his neck.

The play, which runs through March 5 at New York’s New Group on 42nd Street, and his new cop flick “Assault on Precinct 13,” which opened on Wednesday, are both actor showcases, ensemble pieces. And Hawke recently completed shooting on a new film by Andrew Niccol: “Lord of War,” the “Gattaca” director’s third film. Hawke’s role in that film is small, and he seems to have taken it out of appreciation of Niccol and the subject matter -- international arms dealing -- which riles him up: “It’s a portrait of some kind of amorality.”

So he’s busy, but he seems starring-role-averse, almost camera-shy, which makes one think there’s something strange about Hawke’s career. Ethan Hawke is famous, but he’s not actually a movie star anymore, because he doesn’t care to be.

Others in his enviable position would start a production company, an idea that seems to gross him out. “I met these young actresses, and they’re like 19, and they have a production deal at Warner, and they talk about how they admire Meryl Streep,” he said. At their age, he noted, “Well, Meryl was going to Vassar....”

At home in the Chelsea

Many of Hawke’s choices seem to stem from romantic notions about the life of the artist, while some stem from fatherhood.

It’s by intention that he’s lived recently in the hideaway of the Chelsea Hotel (though he plans to move into a new apartment in the next few months), and his two novels about tortured love further underline his manly yet sensitive side. At the Chelsea, chic and expensive now but not forgotten as the seedy paradise where Dylan Thomas tried to drink himself to death and the Warhol crowd reinvented the art scene, Hawke is living the life one might have expected River Phoenix to have had.

And his love of theater consists of equal parts long-lingering adolescent rebellion and an attraction to the idea of artist as a poor struggler: It’s an opposition to Hollywood glitz and a glorification of New York, where the truly revered artistes ride the subways and eat in cruddy diners. “There’s a mythology to New York theater. You might be doing some play in a basement, but it was a basement in which Sam Shepard first did ‘A Lie of the Mind,’ ” he said. Or: “Just imagine opening night of Brando in ‘Streetcar.’ Somehow it’s the pinnacle of artistic glamour.” Contrast: “No one cares about theater in L.A. There’s no money to be made in it out there. There’s no residuals.”

So Hawke is doing his part to control the Hollywood population boom. “Did you see ‘Talk to Her’? Would that movie have been good if it was Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson? There was something so beautiful about the fact that it wasn’t. That’s what’s so refreshing about ‘Sideways.’ Most movies are made from this pool of about 20 people. It’s boring.” So he has to stay attuned to his celebrity-meter. “I don’t want any more celebrity than I already have. It’s useful to get things done, but it’s so corrosive to the rest of your life.” He dug into a pool of yolk and bacon and salad and fruit. “Hey! I know you!” he yelled to a toddler in the cafe. He kissed the child’s mother. “I bought their apartment,” he explained.

Anyway: “I can’t imagine how bad the script would have to be to turn down $20 million. But the people who get offered 20 million already have 20 million.” He trailed off. But are there Hollywood regrets inspired by his unwillingness to pimp himself?

“There’s an alternate universe out there of movies that I really wanted to do that never got financed. And just because they didn’t get financed isn’t that people wouldn’t like them. It’s kind of frustrating sometimes that you have a couple great projects that you can’t get made, and something ... less great is going. So do I sit around my house and do nothing for four months? And also with me, it’s funny, sometimes I’m not in the mood to work, so I’ll miss good opportunities.”

The three-hour-plus “Hurlyburly,” which costars New York indie queen Parker Posey, Wallace Shawn and Bobby Cannavale -- who is now best known as Will’s ex-cop, maybe ex-boyfriend on “Will & Grace” -- is in a way the opposite of “Assault on Precinct 13.” “The primary goal of ‘Assault’ is for you to have a great time on Friday night,” said Hawke. “Hot chicks, cool guns and a cool story.”

It’s a self-consciously ‘70s-style cop movie that on occasion drastically breaks with the genre’s conventions. And the movie takes pains to develop its characters rather than relying on the shoot-’em-up stuff, but it’s also still violent as hell: “Is there anyone who comes on screen who doesn’t get shot?” Hawke asked rhetorically. “By the end of the movie, if there is, it’s like 2 percent. Everyone who shows their face on camera gets a bullet.”

But on stage, in “Hurlyburly,” the violence people do to one another is nearly entirely emotional. Hawke will spend the next six weeks or so in full public view: The audience enters the theater and Hawke is already on stage, crashed face down on the couch, his underwear half-down -- and, in a dream for stage actors who like to suffer for their art, he hardly leaves the stage during the play. The set itself is like a television: On the wide stage, the actors are pushed so far to the front that one worries they’ll topple into the first row.

At the end of a performance of “Hurlyburly” during its first week of previews, Hawke, in boxers and a tank top, was left alone in a spotlight. After blackout, the lights came up and he brushed the tears from both cheeks and bopped up from the couch, suddenly exuberant.

Earlier he’d said, “While I’m performing is the happiest time of the day, but the fear about getting sick, every time someone almost runs over your foot -- it’s almost arrogance in a way, as if it mattered if you did the play. But it does matter, you’ve put all this work in to it, and your friends.... You worry about your voice, you worry about your nose, your back.... It’s a pain.... Julie Delpy used to always say: ‘It was so much fun when we were writing, but when we’re actors we turn into different people -- like, “Am I fat?” ’ “

He is not fat, although he is extremely, almost blindingly pale, and he’s clearly stopped working out. After the second curtain call, he bounced across the stage. He held out an arm for the cast to file past him up the set’s stairs, turned to grin sheepishly at the audience -- a much younger crowd than most serious theater gets these days -- then followed the others. As Hawke hit the stairs to disappear, Cannavale smacked him on the butt like a gymnast’s coach, or a football player.

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On the Web

To see scenes from “Assault on Precinct 13,” visit caledarlive.com/assault.