Ethan Hawke ‘hated’ the Gen X label in his 20s. Now, ‘I’m kind of proud of it,’ he says. - The Boston Globe (2024)

“The whole thing of being a ‘slacker,’ in a way it didn’t really mean you didn’t do anything,” he says. “It meant that you didn’t sign up for anything. And I haven’t signed up for anything. You know, I never wanted to put a trademark by my name. I never wanted to have a brand.”

Hawke may not have a brand — Gen X loathed “selling out” as much it loved Pearl Jam — but he does have a recurring theme: the willingness to try, to take risks, to fail. As an actor, he’s hard to pin down, playing everything from an American tourist in love in Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” to a rookie cop in “Training Day” to abolitionist John Brown in the miniseries “The Good Lord Bird.” (He even made a “Dead Poets” cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video “Fortnight.”)

As a director, he swings big. For his HBO Max documentary series “The Last Movie Stars,” he cast actors George Clooney and Laura Linney to voice married movie stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in a textured examination of their lives, love, and legacy.

“Wildcat,” which Hawke cowrote with Vermont-based writer and composer Shelby Gaines, is experimental in its own way. It weaves characters from O’Connor’s stories into a narrative that centers her effort to publish her first novel while dealing with illness brought on by lupus, which eventually would kill her, in 1964, at the age of 39.

“I don’t like biopics,” says Hawke, who cast Linney as O’Connor’s mother and shot the film in Louisville, Ky. “I wanted to use Flannery’s life and work to kind of start a conversation about imagination, faith, and reality.” He laughs at himself. “That sounds pretentious!”

In fact, “Wildcat” — the name of one of O’Connor’s early short stories — originated with Maya Hawke (the director’s daughter with ex-wife Uma Thurman). At 25, she is perhaps best known for her role in Netflix’s “Stranger Things.” She used O’Connor’s “A Prayer Journal” to audition for Juilliard before her acting career took off, and later pitched a film about the Georgia-born writer to her father and his wife and producing partner, Ryan Hawke, hoping he would direct, says Gaines.

Talking about movies, books, and rock ’n’ roll “has always been our safe place, the meeting ground where we’re really simpatico,” Hawke says of his oldest child. “It would be dishonest to imply that it’s really even a mentor-pupil relationship at this point. She inspires me tremendously. One of the great benefits of getting older is having these young people in your life [who] are pushing your idealism, and challenging you to be the person you said you were when they were 15.”

Hawke, who has three other children (a 22-year-old son with Thurman, and two younger daughters with Ryan), stresses it was Maya’s clout that got the film greenlit. “I mean, this is a hard movie to get financed — if Maya’s not in ‘Stranger Things,’ this movie doesn’t happen.”

The father-daughter duo has been promoting “Wildcat” — which so far has met with mixed reviews — at independent cinemas around the country. On May 23, he will appear at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre for a post-screening Q&A. “It’s a special movie theater,” Hawke says (he lives in Brooklyn and has a house in Connecticut). “People’s attention spans are under siege, so these independent theaters that create an event out of going to the movies are exciting to me.” Participating in such events, he adds, is “kind of part of the mission.”

At times, Hawke speaks about filmmaking as a near-religious experience, a way to work through “some of life’s more difficult, unanswerable questions.” In particular, there’s “an aspect of the performing arts that is similar to a belief system,” he says, “a belief system that our stories matter, that who we are matters . . . That’s what actors do, right, is try to figure out who people are, and why.” (He’s currently attached to star as a gun-for-hire in “The Last of the Tribe,” a thriller set in Brazil’s Amazon and based on the book by Monte Reel, Variety reported Tuesday.)

According to Gaines, Hawke is “a really hardworking guy” who’s “always overflowing with great ideas and enthusiasms for things that he wants to make,” from films to music to books (like his 2021 novel, “A Bright Ray of Darkness”). By the actor’s own account, he’s a bit of an outsider. Born in Austin, Texas (his maternal grandfather, Howard Green, once co-owned the Abilene Blue Sox), he was 4 when his parents divorced; he moved with his mother to Stratton, Vt. (and later Princeton, N.J.), where she got a job waitressing at a ski resort and he got free ski passes.

Those years in Vermont are among his “happiest memories,” says the actor, and he now has “the interesting vantage point of being from the South but not of the South, and being from New England but not of New England.” All that moving around, he adds, “created an observer.”

As a young actor, he was also watching his directors. “I’ve had such an education in film,” he says, ticking off a long list of mentors and collaborators, including “Dead Poets” director Peter Weir, “who would take you to the museum and walk you around [to] study painters.”

Over three decades of acting, he’s worked with everyone from Sidney Lumet to Antoine Fuqua and Alfonso Cuarón, “all of whom come at directing movies from completely different angles,” he notes. “It proves there’s just not one right way to make a movie, and the people who seem to do it really well follow their own voice.”

Following his own voice as a writer-director has meant keeping a singular focus on his subject matter: in this case, O’Connor. “The more we studied her, the more respect we had for her artistry; she was so disciplined,” Hawke says, adding that, if form were to match content, “we needed to be disciplined, too . . . and each shot had to have some secret meaning to it.”

One of his closest collaborators has been Linklater, whose film “Boyhood,” filmed over 12 years, earned Hawke an Oscar nod for best supporting actor (he received another for “Training Day”). Hawke cowrote the sequels “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” both nominated for best adapted screenplay. “Those three movies were powerful experiences for me,” he says of the “Before” trilogy, explaining that Linklater essentially asked him and his costar, Julie Delpy, to mine their own life experiences “to blur the line between character and actor.”

He’s described his work with Linklater as “obituary-worthy.”

Obituary-worthy?

He laughs. “I think about that all the time.”

Morbid question, but what else does he think should be mentioned in his obituary? A pause. “You know, what popped through my head is — one of the things that really disappointed my grandfather, when he was dying, was that there were no women left who remembered him as the lothario that he was. He was like, ‘I had so many wonderful lovers my whole life, they’re all gone, and the only people who remember me . . . remember me as this old man, and I wasn’t always an old man.’

“I found that very sad and poignant and funny,” he says.

For now, Hawke has the perspective of middle age. His son, Levon, is about to graduate from Brown, and like so many parents of college-age kids, Hawke is conflicted about our current moment, including campus unrest. “I know a lot about it. But I don’t know what I think,” he says quietly.

“I’m generally impressed whenever young people care.”

Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.