Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images Ethan Hawke is a little wired. It's just after 9 a.m., we're sitting on a West Hollywood restaurant patio, and he's on his fourth cup of coffee. "You ever read a Harrison Ford interview? I watch him and I'm like, 'How does he do that?'" Hawke says. "It's like he's writing his response in his head - deleting that one, writing another one. Then he comes out with it." He smiles to himself. "I can't do that. That ain't me." For the last few months, Hawke has been asked to talk a whole lot. The Austin, Texas, native is winding down work on the campaign trail for Blue Moon, directed by his longtime collaborator Richard Linklater and featuring his most transformative performance on screen, as the alcoholic depressive songwriter Lorenz Hart. Hawke has already been nominated for the Golden Globe and Actor Awards - and should the Oscars follow suit, it'll be his first ever Academy nod for a lead role. "It's symbolic of 30 years of work to me, and it's so different from anything I've ever done - but it uses pieces of everything that I've learned along the way," Hawke says, reaching for the french press carafe. It's the latest in a string of bold, distinctive star turns, which also includes the critically acclaimed shows The Good Lord Bird and The Lowdown and the Paul Schrader film First Reformed. Related Stories THR Digital Cover "Man, the Next Movie I Do May Be My Last": Six of the World's Greatest Filmmakers Dish on THR's Directors Roundtable Movies 'Sinners,' 'Highest 2 Lowest' Lead NAACP Image Awards Nominations That movie, which found Hawke portraying a tormented priest, arguably ushered in this new career chapter - and fans were disappointed when he missed out on an Oscar nomination despite loads of precursor prizes. Hawke too looks back on that with some regret. "I didn't do [the campaign] on First Reformed because I was doing a play, and I wasn't going to drop out of the play - but all things being equal, when it was over, I thought it probably would've been great for the film if I had done it," Hawke says. He acknowledges having felt some personal hesitancy: "First Reformed was hard to talk about: climate change, loss of faith in America - and it's a Paul Schrader movie, so, does he blow himself up in the end?" (Schrader is known for a controversial sound bite every now and then.) "It was a hard one. It was not something you were dying to do interviews about." Blue Moon presented a simpler brief: It's set in New York circa 1943 over one night at Sardi's, imagining Hart drinking his pain away on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the new musical by his former partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). It's the latest Linklater-Hawke teamup, a creative relationship that's spanned more than three decades and resulted in multiple shared Oscar nominations for screenplays (on the Before movies). And in the nine years since First Reformed, the industry has changed in such a way that the future of independent American movies feels newly, intensely under threat. Getting out there to support Blue Moon seemed like a no-brainer. "If you see this whole thing as an advertisement for our industry, then it starts to be fun - like, okay, let's remind everybody that these movies are important and a relevant part of our culture," Hawke says. "We want movies like Blue Moon for other people. If the people invested in Blue Moon make money off of it and it makes audiences happy, there'll be more of them." Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon Sony Pictures Classics Hawke has received two acting Oscar nominations, for his supporting roles in 2001's Training Day and 2015's Boyhood. These were, he says, "the two time periods in my life where I very clearly felt people narrativizing my life as if something had changed - like, 'Oh, now he's back on track.'" When Training Day came out, he noticed coverage amounting to, "Wow, that's what happened to the kid from Dead Poets Society, he's a man now!" Boyhood was a stranger case, since it was shot in increments over 12 years, with Hawke and co-star Patricia Arquette's careers and lives slowly changing in that time - only for the world to treat its release as an epic comeback for them both. "I remember reading articles about a Hawke-aissance or something. I'm like, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'" Hawke explains, "This job that I'm in is a constant recontextualization, not for yourself, but for the people watching." He's noticed it happening again with Blue Moon and the buzz surrounding it - he's also terrific in The Lowdown, which FX just renewed for a second season - but this time, sees a more natural turning point worth exploring and discussing. "I came out of the gate getting leading parts and that can breed a laziness about the actual methodology of acting," Hawke says. "I was teaching myself to reboot the computer, from a leading man to a character actor, and thinking, 'What if I could combine these things?' If you don't do that as you get older, you get a lot less op