A reporter recently asked Ethan Hawke about the greatest kisses in movie history. Hawke knew exactly which one would top his personal list: his kiss with Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1998 drama Great Expectations.
“We didn’t even win the MTV Movie Award!” Paltrow responds when he tells her this as they sit down for a Reunited conversation in Los Angeles. “How do we not win? That water fountain kissing scene is iconic.”
Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations is full of memorable moments—Hawke and Paltrow dancing in a fancy restaurant, the two kissing in the pouring rain, and Paltrow wearing an iconic green ensemble that Emma Stone recently replicated. When Paltrow and Hawke filmed the movie, they were both on the upswing: Hawke had already starred in Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, and Gattaca, while Paltrow had four more movies released in 1998—including Shakespeare in Love, which would win her an Oscar.
The two were already friends when they filmed Great Expectations; they ran in the same New York social circle that included other aspiring artists like producer Jason Blum and playwright Jonathan Marc Sherman. “There were no phones,” Hawke says. “I tell my kids you would just go to places hoping to meet people.”
Since then, Paltrow and Hawke have remained friends, with both having become movie stars. Interestingly, this year both play show folk who’ve gone to seed and are grappling with intense loneliness as they try to reclaim their past glory. Paltrow, who hadn’t had a substantial film role in 10 years, stars in Marty Supreme as Kay Stone, a retired actor who meets an ambitious young table tennis player (Timothée Chalamet). In Blue Moon, Hawke transforms into Lorenz Hart, an iconic lyricist whose longtime collaboration with his creative partner, Richard Rodgers, has just fallen apart.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Hawke and Paltrow reminisce about their first makeout session, the sex scene that wasn’t in Great Expectations, and the real advantage of being a nepo baby.
Vanity Fair: What do you remember about the first time you met?
Ethan Hawke: I remember that I met you through Robert Sean Leonard, who was my costar on Dead Poets Society. You guys were friends.
Gwyneth Paltrow: We were dating, right?
Hawke: I didn’t want to say it.
Paltrow: We grew up in New York City in the early ’90s. It was so fun and specific, and there was a whole big bunch of us, and we all just kind of fell in with each other.
Hawke: For young people right now, the thing that I most would like to give them is community. There was about a six-month period where I would run into you at six or seven different places—at somebody’s house, at a party, at a play opening, at the Corner Bistro, or this other bar.
Paltrow: And he was very famous from Dead Poets Society. So we were all a little intimidated. He had made it.
Hawke: I thought I’d made it too—I acted like it. But it was so much fun. And there was always this playwright, Jonathan Marc Sherman, who somehow knew where everybody was. If you went where Sherm was, invariably there’d be 15 other cool people there.
Paltrow: And a lot of drugs and alcohol.
Hawke: Yeah, that’s true too. He was very good at getting you to play truth or dare.
Paltrow: That’s the first time we made out, remember? Truth or dare in my apartment on Prince Street.
Hawke: I didn’t want that to happen in that stupid game. I had different plans for that moment, rather than being surrounded by a bunch of drunk knuckleheads. But we had a lot of fun, and it felt like it was in the service of something. We all were pretty driven.
Paltrow: We were. It was this beautiful time where you could be 21 and afford to live in Manhattan. I think the fabric has changed a lot there. It’s a lot harder.
Hawke: We didn’t know it, but it actually was a great time for film. I was so worried that I’d missed the ’70s that I didn’t really quite recognize what an exciting time period the ’90s were. There were so many interesting films coming out, and they were culturally relevant in a way that was very exciting. The movies were the center of conversation and ideas.
What did it feel like when you booked Great Expectations together?
Paltrow: I was really excited because I had never worked with a friend. So Ethan was already cast—he was the star. I remember meeting with Alfonso [Cuarón]. And then there was a little blip where someone at the studio thought I wasn’t pretty enough to do it. Do you remember that?
Hawke: That’s the kind of shit that happens all the time.
Paltrow: And then I think he was convinced otherwise. Then I finally got the part.
Hawke: We were already friends, and it was strange for both of us, to be honest. I’m kind of proud of us. We really believed in Alfonso. He was a lunatic—is a lunatic. I’ll say that on record. A wonderful lunatic. But we did recognize a major talent.
Paltrow: I remember when I went to do my costume fitting for the movie, and I was like, “Wow, everything is green.” And Judianna [Makovsky], the costume director, would say, “Oh right—he always leaves it to me to tell everybody. Everything you’re going to wear is green in the entire movie.”
Hawke: Do you remember Alfonso pitching you the love scene?
Paltrow: Oh my God. He’s like, “And then he’s going to go down on you.” And I was like, “Oh my God, my father is gonna have a heart attack.”
Hawke: “The camera is going to go down your belly, and then it’s going to go up your breasts, and then it’s going to go in your face as you reach ecstasy. And when you reach ecstasy, the lights will explode like to the sun!” And I remember Gywneth going, “Alfonso, I’m never going to do that.”
Paltrow: In my early career, I was really self-conscious about my dad and grandfather seeing this kind of stuff. It really bothered me. Now I wouldn’t care.
Hawke: You were amazing, the way you handled that, which was that you weren’t petulant. You were just saying, “Look, I’m not going to do this. There’s a way we can do eroticism, and I’d like to do it, but that’s not going to work.”
Paltrow: Maybe I was too prudish in the moment. I was definitely worried about it.
What do you remember about this time in your career and what you were looking for as actors?
Hawke: That was an intense time for me. I was trying to figure out who I was. I was writing a lot. I didn’t understand how those two parts of myself could coexist and whether I could make that work—the part of me that was running the theater company [Malaparte] with the part of me that wanted to be a movie actor.
Paltrow: You really never sold out. A lot of us did, for whatever reason. It’s sort of an ugly word, but I always admired how you never did that, and you were so ruled by your artistic integrity. You were brave in your choices. As a writer, as a director, he never compromised. Do you have any regrets? Do you regret turning down some of those big movies that you turned down? He turned down a lot of really big movies!
Hawke: I had something inside myself I was trying to work out that I didn’t think those movies were going to do for me. I thought that they would be a massive distraction, but I wasn’t sure what it is I was trying to work out. There are days in my past that I regretted it. I was extremely—I say this with no pride at all—confident. I thought those offers would always be there. There’s been many years where they were not, where I was like, Damn it. I didn’t know that that door closed, and there were some hard days in there. And then I found out that they weren’t closed. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you find a way.
Gwyneth, do you have regrets or projects you wish you had taken or not taken?
Paltrow: No, I don’t regret anything. I guess there are a couple of movies that I did that I’m not particularly proud of. I have to say, I feel very lucky because, when you look back, even at some great, amazing careers of stars from the ’40s and ’50s, some of them have been in three classic, amazing [things]—and that’s enough. And I feel like I was in at least three, maybe four, maybe five, where it’s like these movies that were kind of indelible.
Hawke: It’s so hard to make one great movie that, if that happens, you start to be really grateful for that. And yeah, you chase it again. I thought that you had a very unique challenge in your life, which is that your relaxation and your depth and your intelligence were available to you at a very young age. I remember seeing you at the Chateau Marmont the day before you won the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. I remember going in my room and thinking what a challenging road you had ahead of you, after the day after tomorrow. It has a lot to do with who you are, and it has a lot to do with an education that I think that your mother and father gave you, nonverbally perhaps.
It’s a strange thing I have when I watch an actor have a lot of success. I see it now with young people—my heart hurts for them. I think they’re phenomenal, but I want them to be protected.
Paltrow: How does that work, then, with your own daughter [actor Maya Hawke]? It must be so compounded.
Hawke: That’s the right question, which is that I don’t worry about her at all. Because I have so much confidence in her.
Paltrow: Maybe it’s what you were remarking about me. Maya grew up in that milieu of you and your lessons, and her sort of imbibing the silent rules of this and what’s important and what the value system is. I think the really underrated benefit of being a nepo baby, if you will, which I am in a certain respect—and that term is quite ugly. But at the same time, it’s like you’re learning these lessons from your parents, who are approaching a career with so much integrity and seriousness and such an incredible work ethic.
Hawke: Steph Curry’s father was a great basketball player, and people like to say, “Oh yeah, it’s the genes and stuff.” Well, it’s a little bit that. But mostly, Steph Curry grew up watching how his father practices—watching his father focus on his meals, listening in the other room to his father and his friends, breaking down games, listening to the way they think about sports. People think it’s about doors being opened for them—it doesn’t matter. Doors get opened and closed for people, and they either blow it or they don’t. What matters is the right way to think about it.
In Marty Supreme and Blue Moon, you both play characters who are successful on the outside, but on the inside are lonely and isolated. Did you relate at all to them in that way?
Hawke: The thing about celebrity that people don’t really understand is how isolating it is. You’re getting lots of things that people imagine that they want, and that is nice. And you’re getting them behind a glass wall. You can try to break it, and you can try to stick your hand outside the cage—but society ends up wanting you to stay in the zoo. It’s extremely lonely, and it’s isolating from your own family. It’s isolating from your friends. I mean, one of the things that broke the theater company apart was my celebrity.
I think both of our characters are on the back nine of their celebrity. There’s a great Dustin Hoffman line that the only thing worse than being recognized everywhere you go is not being recognized everywhere you go anymore.
Paltrow: My character in the film, she walked away. But her fame is what makes this young kid interested in her. It’s not her, it’s fame.
Hawke: Now I have one selfish question I have to ask about this movie, which is that you kiss Timmy Chalamet in Central Park. Did you shoot it in Central Park?
Paltrow: Yes.
Hawke: Did you kiss him in the same place you kissed me?
Paltrow: No! Honey, never! I never would’ve done that. I never would’ve desecrated our makeout spot like that.
Going off Blue Moon: If a biopic were made about your lives, what do you think they would get wrong?
Paltrow: I sort of exist in these tropes in the culture in a lot of ways, so it would probably get a lot of things wrong. I think very few people understand who I am, unless they really know me and have known me for a long time, and have known my insane sense of humor. I feel like so much gets projected on me.
Hawke: The biopic would say so much more about the people who made it than it would be about me. They would be using me to some end. If Larry Hart were to see this movie, I would think he would say, “Wow, I just learned a lot about [director] Richard Linklater.” I don’t think he learned a damn thing about himself.
When you look back at Ethan and Gwyneth of the late ’90s, what’s the most surprising change that’s come about in your life?
Paltrow: Do you still eat Taco Bell?
Hawke: When Gwyneth and I met, my idea of a special night—I got a part in a Broadway play? We’re going to Taco Bell. When I finished The Hottest State, my first novel? Went to Taco Bell.
Paltrow: It’s a sickness.
Hawke: The thing is, now there’s so many people attached to me, like my wife and my kids, that would not be caught dead there. If I’m alone?
Paltrow: You’re at Taco Bell.
Hawke: I’ve had the same order for 30 years, and it makes me really happy. I think it’s remarkable how we haven’t changed. I’m proud of that. We were two extremely idealistic young people who had a great vision for what we wanted to do and how we wanted to contribute. You have never been ordinary, and you have not been an ordinary movie star. You’ve always been you.
Paltrow: I think we are fundamentally very much the same people. We have had these lives that have taken all kinds of twists and turns, but I think we’ve both remained true to ourselves and who we are.
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