Ethan Hawke names the most overlooked movie of his career: “My secret favourites”

It’s always a treat when you discover a hidden gem within the filmography of one of your favourite actors. Whether it be the surprising existence of Big Night in Stanley Tucci’s career or Margot at the Wedding in Nicole Kidman’s, it’s always exciting to feel as though you’ve discovered something. In the case of Ethan Hawke, he shared one personal project which remains fairly unknown, but he hopes people will discover it again.

Predestination, directed in 2014 by Michael and Peter Spierig, chronicles the life of a time-traveller whose job is to prevent future killers from committing crimes, tasked with tracking one killer who has evaded him for his entire life. Ethan Hawke and co-star Sarah Snook orbit around each other in this trippy and unnerving thriller, bending the tropes of the genre to create a modern twist on a time-travel story.

Hawke and Snook are nothing short of spectacular, with Snook giving a brave and daring performance that showed her to be a scene-stealer before the success of Succession, with Hawke’s character coming across as both haggard and energised in his urgent quest.

When asked about the film, Hawke said, “One of my secret favourites that a lot of people haven’t seen is a sci-fi movie called Predestination. I think Sarah Snook is incredible in that film. If you’re a movie buff, it’s hard to make a good time-travel movie. I’ve spent my entire life leaving time-travel movies going, ‘Wait a second: that didn’t make sense.’ Because the math of it breaks your brain. But I really like Predestination. I had a cop once pull me over. I said, ‘What did I do wrong?’ And he was like, ‘Eh, I just recognised you driving by, and I got to ask you about the end of Predestination.’”

The ending of the film is definitely a head-scratcher and not one to watch if you’re trying to avoid a sleepless night. But despite the committed (albeit small) fanbase of the film, it struggled to reach global audiences, perhaps because it was an Australian production and the marketing didn’t have the same reach overseas. It barely recuperated its budget, with $5million spent on the production and only earning $5.4m in box office sales. Despite this, the film was praised by critics, with Snook’s performance in particular being defined as a ‘career-making role’.

The film also centres around a trans narrative, with one of the characters having a sex change operation, a procedure that we don’t often see in mainstream media. With the increasing demand for more representation of these stories in film, maybe we can expect to see the fan base for this film broaden as it is re-discovered by people who empathise with this.

Snook has since won two Golden Globe awards and a Primetime Emmy Award for her portrayal of Shiv Roy in Succession and will star in the West End adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, playing each and every character herself. Hawke recently shot Richard Linklater’s latest film, Blue Moon, which he said was “the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life”.

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