'It changed my life': Ethan Hawke on his role in tense 2001 drama Tape

The Hollywood star played a drug dealer in this dark, claustrophobic thriller. For the BBC's Close Up Film series, he reflects on the surprising part that means the most to him in his career.

The painfully shy schoolboy who finds his voice in Dead Poets Society. The cynical musician in Reality Bites, which made him a poster boy for Generation X. The doubt-filled alcoholic priest of First Reformed. And the brilliant but wounded lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, which gave him his first best actor Oscar nomination at the age of 54.

They are among the many roles that Ethan Hawke has played during a 40-year acting career, and this week sees the UK release of his latest film, The Weight, an adventure drama set during the Great Depression. Hawke plays a convict, Murphy, who strikes a deal to smuggle gold through the Oregon wilderness in exchange for being freed from a labour camp.

But when asked to name the film role that has been most significant to him, he chooses a surprising film from his extensive CV.

"If I had to pick a film role that changed my life, it would be Tape," Hawke tells the BBC, referring to the low-budget claustrophobic 2001 drama he made with his regular collaborator, director Richard Linklater.

"I would say that film was my entrance to adult acting. I was about to turn 30 years old, so I was becoming a grown up. And it was when digital video was a brand new technology. Linklater and I were really excited about how this new form was going to change movies. We went and made this really simple film which takes place inside one motel room."

Shot in six days using handheld digital-video cameras, the 86-minute film stars Hawke, his then wife Uma Thurman and his Dead Poets Society co-star Robert Sean Leonard. Hawke plays Vince, a part-time drug dealer who secretly records an old friend, film-maker Jon (Leonard), confessing to raping Amy (Thurman), a former classmate once involved with both men. When Amy arrives at the motel where Vince and Jon have met up, their competing accounts of the past unravel.

Visually, the film is an unsettling experience, as the cameras prowl around the room, making the viewer feel trapped in the space with the characters.

"We got to work in a very different way than we'd ever done before because of the way these cameras worked," Hawke says. "There was no laziness. No one really wants to see a film set in one room. We knew we had to be laser sharp, precise and funny."

He adds that the existing intimacy between himself, Thurman and Leonard gave momentum to the process. 

"The three of us were friends, and it allowed the rehearsal process to get deep very quickly," he says. "Every film has an interesting subconscious, and Linklater thought there was a subtext in myself and Robert Sean Leonard having famously played high school roommates in Dead Poets Society. Tape is a film set 10 years out of school."

One critic said at the time that Tape had released Hawke's "inner actor". Hawke says that the film also prepared him for the significant role that followed, as idealistic rookie cop Jake Hoyt in 2001's Training Day, opposite Denzel Washington. His performance gave Hawke the first of his two nominations for the best supporting actor Oscar.

"I did Tape right before Training Day, and I remember feeling so grateful that I'd had that experience, because Denzel was the most remarkable artist I'd ever worked with," he says. "His imagination is so powerful, and his charisma is so all-engaging. Training Day put everything I had learned to the test."

Hawke and Linklater have enjoyed a 30-year screen collaboration spanning nine films. The first was 1995's romantic drama Before Sunrise, part of a trilogy that subsequently included Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013): both of these earned Hawke a shared Oscar nomination with Linklater and co-star Julie Delpy for best screenplay. Their latest project together was 2025's Blue Moon.

Hawke explains that in 2000, when they made Tape, "we'd already made three films together and I didn't have to earn somebody's trust. We could just dive into the deep end right away and experiment with the form."

"I knew that when I met Linklater, I was meeting somebody who was absolutely unique," he adds. "He's 66 years old now and just as playful and inventive as ever, and you can never predict what he's going to do next."

Looking back, Hawke says that he divides his career into chapters, "because I've been acting since I was 14. Parts have unlocked a different part of me or a different chapter of my relationship to acting. The obvious thing is that Dead Poets Society gave me a career, but then Reality Bites changed what that career looked like, because suddenly everything was about 'Gen X'. And then Training Day happened and unlocked something else. But then I had developed so much confidence from Tape – the film had made me an adult actor."

More like this:

• Digger review: Tom Cruise takes the 'biggest risk of his career'

• 12 of the best films to watch this October

• Four things Jane Austen adaptations get wrong

Even after nearly 40 years of success, Hawke says there are still types of roles he's yet to play – although The Weight allowed him to tick off one of them. "I'd never been asked to play an old-fashioned good guy before like Murphy. I don't understand why not. I felt like I didn't see them very much any more in movies. I wanted to try something different and put some soul into it."

The film, directed by Padraic McKinley (a producer and editor on the series The Good Lord Bird, which Hawke starred in), has Russell Crowe playing a corrupt warden of a work camp, who offers Murphy a deal to smuggle gold in return for his freedom and to be reunited with his young daughter. 

The actor says he was longing for the experience it offered. "You'd never make a movie like this unless you wanted adventure in the outdoors," he says. "We made it last summer in the Bavarian Forest and we didn't have much money, but we had a mission. It was to make an old-fashioned action film; the kind I had a dream of making when I was a kid. You hear about the shooting of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Bogart and Huston doing The African Queen. You hear about these grand adventures the actors had. I was longing for that."

A quarter of a century after Tape was released, Hawke is now in a position himself to help similarly boundary-pushing and experimental films get produced. In fact, he says he's always asking himself the question: "What movies should [I] help get made? You need to keep looking for things that you think are worth somebody's time, combined with what is going to push you forward."

"But," he adds, "one of the things that's so interesting about getting older is that it really just seems like one lifetime is not enough. The more you learn, the more you realise you didn't know."

The Weight is released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 2 October 2026.

--

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.

For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.