Ethan Hawke recalled being cognizant of Dead Poets Society co-star Robin Williams‘ mental health struggles, saying the actor’s “end of his life does not define his life to me.”
In an extended interview with CBS Sunday Morning‘s Tracy Smith, the Reality Bites star was asked if his viewing of the inimitable 1989 Peter Weir-directed boarding school drama has changed since Williams’ death by suicide at the age of 63 in 2014.
“It does not fundamentally change the way I watch the movie because, even at 18, I was aware of the complexity of his emotional life,” Hawke said. “I’ve had a lot of depression in my family, and it was obvious to me that all that power and that charisma came at a certain cost. [He was] a deeply, deeply sensitive person, who was highly attuned to the energy of a room.”
The four-time Oscar-nominated actor remembered one particular, stark experience that contextualized the difference between Williams’ public persona and his interior life.
“I remember, once, he was making up lines, and everybody’s laughing and everybody’s praising him, and I went to get a glass of water, get a bagel or something, and I saw him hiding in a little corner, just hiding in the dark, by himself,” he explained. “And I [go], ‘Oh, OK.’ It makes a lot more sense to me now, actually. It was a lot; it was taxing. There’s a lot of stories about clowns and the happiness that they give and at what cost.”
The Before Sunrise star concluded, “So, I say all that to say, the end of his life does not define his life to me. When I watch the movie, I think of the spirit of the man that I knew on those days and how powerful it was and how much he weathered that storm of his own psyche for us and for other people. I admire him tremendously. There aren’t two of him.”
Written by Tom Schuman, the Academy Award-winning coming-of-age classic follows free-spirited teacher John Keating (Williams, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar) upon his 1959 return to a prestigious all-boys preparatory school in New England, whose nonconformist approach to the instruction of poetry inspires his students to explore self-discovery.
Hawke is currently making the awards rounds for his turn in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, his ninth collaboration with the auteur, which follows the opening night of 1943 musical Oklahoma! and marked an inflection point between duo Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Lorenz “Larry” Hart (Hawke), as the former embarks on a new professional chapter with collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney).