Ethan Hawke’s new HBO Max docuseries The Last Movie Stars focuses on the romance and careers of Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward, which was very personal to the actor, director, writer, and showrunner. It utilizes transcripts from an old project Newman commissioned later in life for a memoir that never happened.

While working on the docuseries, Hawke spent the first year wondering, “Why is this falling into my lap? There are better documentary filmmakers. What can I add?” The answer he came up with was, ‘Well, I am an actor, and I do know that it’s so hard to make one good movie. If you love and want that feeling again, it’s incredibly stress-inducing and competitive. You know, Newman won Best Actor at Cannes in the ’50s and Best Actor at Berlin in the ’90s. That’s a big career. There isn’t a bad period beyond maybe two and a half years.”

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Another thing Hawke stated during the interview was that “if you want to understand the life of an artist, you have to understand the failures.” Such as The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which according to Hawke, was brilliant, but universally panned. Some movies are widely panned but don’t deserve it. In his own filmography, he signaled Gattaca as a film that didn’t deserve its initial, awful reception.

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Hawke, like Newman, also had to deal with a divorce that both played out in public and was treated like a scandal. Looking back, the actor said that the thing that got the thing that got him through that was work. “The answer is always work.” Hawke doubled down by deciding that no amount of brad press would turn him into a bad actor if he didn’t let it. He “took Chekhov and Shakespeare around the world for a year,” in addition to doing Hurly Burly, The Coast of Utopia, and The Bridge Project.

During the final episode of the documentary, Hawke shows us how the media processed Newman’s death. Hawke admitted that he has “a weird pathological thing” about how the media will discuss his career after he’s gone. He’ll see a shot that he thinks is good, like his entrance in The Magnificent Seven or something from the Before trilogy, and wonder if that’ll be the shot that plays during his in memoriam.

When Hawke was younger, he would say, “I’ll do this, I’ll do that, that’ll be a good learning experience, and then I’ll try this,” thinking that he had all the time in the world. Now, he’s at the point in his life where he says, “I didn’t learn anything from that one or that one, and that one would’ve been better spent in three months with my family.” Then, when asked about his sense of how subsequent generations saw the craft of acting, Hawke had this to say: