Kat Johnson: Hi, this is Audible Editor Kat Johnson, and I'm here today with the acclaimed actor, author, and icon, Ethan Hawke, to talk about his new crime drama, the Audible Original podcast Fishpriest. Hawke stars as an undercover narcotics officer turned bounty hunter who is looking for redemption in the Bronx circa 1993. Welcome to Audible, Ethan. It's so lovely to speak with you today.
Ethan Hawke: Well, it's wonderful to be here. Thanks for this.
KJ: Before we get started, I have to ask you about the title. Can you tell our listeners who might not know what a “fishpriest” is? And did you know what it was before you got started in this project?
EH: Well, I did not know what it was, and it's such a strange word, fishpriest, that it's probably a large part of the reason why I ended up doing it. When you see a title called Fishpriest, you're like, "I want to read this. What the hell is a fishpriest?" It's in reference to a tool that fishermen used to kill big fish. And this cop, Tommy, used to be a fisherman and his father was a fisherman and he used these fish priests. So he would carry one around to kind of intimidate said criminals.
KJ: It's a very evocative word. And I actually read that it's a “priest” because the person who's using it is delivering the fish their last rites. This is a very different kind of project for you. It's an eight-episode scripted fiction podcast. How did you get involved in the project? What was appealing about it to you?
EH: Well, the work that Audible has been doing has been a kind of vibrant part of our life. And by our, I mean my family's life. My kids are listening to Audible, my wife listens to Audible, and I really enjoy it. And the idea of trying to re-explore what an audio play could be was dynamic and interesting to me. When I was a kid, I remember being fascinated that people used to listen to the radio all the time. It was a big part of people's lives. You'd always hear about Orson Welles doing audio of War of the Worlds. Everybody thought Martians really were attacking, because they had this reading on the radio and how real it was.
As a performer, the power of the voice is an art form unto itself. And I love sound design. And what Audible's trying to do is not to repeat these old-timey plays or whatever, but trying to usher that genre of storytelling into 2022. These guys I met, they were so passionate and excited about what they could achieve in the auditory world. And I think it's a great way for us to use our imaginations. One of the problems with movies sometimes is they do so much of the work for you, and they rob you of the experience of really engaging your own imagination. So I read it and I just loved it.
One of the things that happened to me years ago, I did a lot of ride-arounds with cops and I had a huge education with Training Day, Brooklyn's Finest, and Assault on Precinct 13, the three kind of big cop pictures I did. I learned a lot and was fascinated by it. There's a long history of great crime fiction and how to tell a good story, because if you do it right, it's a way to have high-pitched drama and also talk about ordinary people's lives. Police intersect with the real world in a way that a lot of us don't. They cross all kinds of socioeconomic lines. They meet lawyers and they meet hotdog salesmen and Christmas tree salesmen. I mean, they just see the world. And so artistically it's a great genre because you're dealing with real life and regular people, but in high-stakes situations, and you can address certain political issues without being political, because you're just talking about people and their lives, but they have larger ramifications. And so I've always really enjoyed it as a possibility.
KJ: I'm so glad that you brought up Training Day because I was thinking about that. Were there things that you drew on from that role that came into play here?
EH: The '90s in New York was a really formative time for me, so it was very easy for me to imagine this because I know those streets and I'm super interested in the Bronx. I'm a part of this organization called DreamYard, which is an amazing organization that works with kids in the arts in the Bronx. For a lot of these kids, their educational system is really hurting. They have no exposure to arts. So I spend time in the Bronx, and it's just really vibrant and alive with a lot of wonderful people.
As you get older and you start playing lots of characters, it's hard for them not to cross-pollinate because they're all different aspects of yourself. Those experiences I had on the movies I talked about—really meeting police officers, working with them, doing ride-arounds, and going to precincts or to jails and meeting people—it's easy for it to be very alive in my imagination from the people I've met in my life.
KJ: I loved seeing the decade from a '90s icon such as yourself. I was curious what you thought about doing a story that was set in the '90s from your perspective now. Does it feel like a historical fiction at this point? I loved how much of the plot hinged on pagers.
EH: Yeah. Not having cell phones, these things that are a big part of our world. Also, all the social justice issues that are very alive in people's minds now with the way that we are thinking and addressing crime reform and what's happening with all these people in prisons—that was something my generation wasn't really thinking about at that time in the way we're thinking about it now. I mean, Rodney King had happened and that was a giant wake-up call for America, certainly for white America. I find these stories interesting to tell by how they accidentally brush up against real issues.
KJ: I wanted to ask you about your character being kind of ambiguous. He's not exactly a villain, but he's not exactly a good guy. And you're of course in Marvel Studios' Moon Knight right now, where you're playing an antagonist. Is there something that draws you to these more complicated roles or these, more like, “not so good guy” roles?
EH: Certainly. If we're talking about Training Day, Jake is an old-fashioned good guy. There are lots of people whose fathers were in the police force, or their grandfathers, or they're coming out of the military and they really want to figure out a way to be of service and to help people, and that's what brings them into it. Then there are other people that get involved in it for more complex reasons. They don't know what else to do with their lives. They're lost, they're confused, they're angry. There are a lot of different ways that people get drawn to their jobs.
On Brooklyn's Finest, I played this character Sal, who was a really great husband, a really great father, and a really terrible cop, you know? And Tommy is not a good guy either, but he's in a very complex world full of morally complex situations and he's kind of lost balance, so to speak, and he's trying to be a good guy. He just has a lot of bad habits.
KJ: One of the things I really loved about this story was Tommy's relationship with Naomi, who he knows from their ties to the Jamaican Shower Posse. I think the bond and the love story that they share is really compelling. So I just want to play a little clip of them towards the end.
Nicole Lewis as Naomi: My advice to you? Stop playing fucking checkers instead of chess and move out of that SRO.
Ethan Hawke as Tommy: It’s a motel.
Naomi: Listen. There’s an envelope on the hub of your traffic cart.
Tommy: It’s a mini patrol vehicle.
Naomi: Pardon me.
Tommy: And I’d appreciate it if you’d remove that bribe from my tire.
Naomi: Not gonna happen. But do with it what you wish. Toss it on the ground for all I care. But do me a favor. You’re gonna eat something first. You’re way too thin. And I’m pretty sure you’re low on cash, no matter how much you lifted off me.
Tommy: That would be accurate.
Naomi: Well that’s what the envelope is for. You gonna arrest me then?
Tommy: No.
Naomi: Goodbye, Thomas.
Tommy: My name is Tommy.
Naomi: Oh, I know. I missed you.
Tommy: And I missed you too.
Naomi: Bye.
KJ: I was curious what you thought about their relationship, because it's got this little bit of an ambiguous ending there. What do you think is ahead for them?
EH: I don't know, but I do love romantic situations that smell of all the weirdness and complexity of real life, and a lot of times fiction movies make it seem like there's a definite good answer or a bad answer, that our lives have these beginning, middles, and ends, and that they accumulate into this resolution that then makes everything makes sense in hindsight. These characters are not sure which way they're facing, so they don't know which way to go. They have intimacy even though the situation where they fell in love was fraudulent. They meet when he's undercover. That was one of my favorite aspects of the story, too. Just the strangeness of their relationship and the fact that you kind of sense somewhere that they do love each other.
"These characters are not sure which way they're facing, so they don't know which way to go. They have intimacy even though the situation where they fell in love was fraudulent. They meet when he's undercover."
KJ: Did you have any favorite moments from recording?
EH: I think we're all going to look back on the period that we spent these last couple years at, and think about what went down differently. I often felt like as a society, we were all like Jonah in the whale. We were just in this darkness of this whale, and we weren't sure where it was going to spit us out. I was shooting Moon Knight in Budapest, and when you're the baddie in a show, you have lots of days off, so I was stuck in Budapest without my family. And they did an amazing job organizing it. It was actually really fun. I'd never done anything like that. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the pandemic was reading and listening to Audible, listening to all different kinds of things that I wouldn't have done if life had been going on normally.
KJ: You mentioned you guys recorded this on Zoom, so it's amazing how that setting comes through your chemistry with Naomi. Some of it is probably the audio. I feel like listening to the sounds of people smoking joints in the audio really just brings it all alive.
EH: Kudos to the sound engineers who worked on this; they were obsessed with it. I love it when you meet people who really, really care about what they do in any field. They were obsessed about getting the sound, you know, what cars sounded like in the '90s and how is it different than what they sound like now? And what about the bell that rings above a bodega door? And what did the police radios sound like in the '90s?
It asks more of you than a movie. But because of that, it has a possibility of giving you more too, because you are asked to engage, you have to participate. You have to hear that joint inhale, and then your brain has to go, "Oh yeah, I can picture that," and your brain pictures it, and you might make it better than some top-notch cinematographer would have. You'll bring your own memories, your own feelings. You picture Tommy or Naomi or any of these other characters the way that you want to. The way that you see a cop doesn't have to be my face. It could be somebody else's face. It could be somebody you love’s face.
KJ: Absolutely. Sometimes I have trouble following action or plots if it's too fast paced, but with this one, I think because it was made specifically for audio, I knew when it was a flashback or we were moving scenes. The audio cues were just so well done. What was the audiobook that your family loved so much recently? Can you share?
EH: We were listening to Suzanne Collins new prequel, The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes.
KJ: Ah, totally. You occupy this really unique space where you're a performer and a creator, and even within the audio world you're a big celebrity. You've narrated some of Jack Kerouac's novels. You're starring in John Grisham's upcoming crime anthology, Sparring Partners, which is coming out later this month. But to my knowledge, this is your first role in a scripted fiction multi-cast audio drama. I'm curious as an actor and a performer, is there something liberating for you or interesting for you about using your voice to bring people into this world?
EH: I love it. When you first go to acting school, one of the first classes they take you to is voice and speech, and about what can be accomplished. The really great theater directors I've worked with cast people based on their voices. It's a strange thing when you don't like the way something sounds, and that's not on purpose. Like sometimes it's great for a bad guy to have a really aggravating voice, particularly if the protagonist has a beautiful voice. There are these ways that our subconscious gets played upon by the way things sound.
There was a guy, Jacques Lusseyran, who was blind and worked for the French resistance. Because he was blind, he had an uncanny ability to be able to tell whether people were lying just by the tone of their voice. He felt he could see light emanating from some people and not light emanating from others when they were closed off. He could feel it in their voice. It's a very interesting story, but it's relevant only in how we communicate with each other and how much of it is vocal.
I'll give you an example. Some of the worst temper tantrums I've ever had in my life are when they screw up the sound on films that I've done, when they change your voice or they cut two takes together, or they think that this rasp in your voice is a mistake and they cut it out, or they do bad sound design so that the performance can't be heard or felt. I don't understand it exactly, but I know when they screw it up and it makes me so upset. People love to talk about how great Meryl Streep's accent work is, but the reason why it's so great is she manages to have an accent and use her own voice. Some people do accents and they just do imitations. And it might be a good imitation, but I can't feel them anymore. So to that point, I'm a student of what the voice does. What does it do when you are up in pitch, what does it do when you're down in pitch, and what does it do when your diction is not good? What does it do if your diction is quite clear?
All these things are the auditory ways in which we are communicating, often subconsciously, to each other. Body language is the same thing. Our brains are amazing at what we pick up. And as a student of human interaction, you're trying to create the illusion of realism so that this spell can be cast and people can absorb a story and perhaps see themselves in it.
So for me, I think part of what turned me on about Fishpriest was, could I do that? Could I communicate a story vocally? You mentioned First Reformed for example, and one of the challenges of a part like that is that Reverend Toller is not an entertaining person. He doesn't try to please you or reach out to you. As a performer, you had to lean back away, but still keep a certain kind of performance where you lean in and you're entertaining. So it's a lie if you connect to the audience, but I have to bring them along. Each film has its own challenges that way from a performance standpoint. But I love being able to act and not worry about what I looked like.
"I think part of what turned me on about Fishpriest was, could I do that? Could I communicate a story vocally?"
KJ: I love that, and First Reformed is my favorite of your roles. Before we go, is there anything else you wanted to share about Fishpriest that we haven't talked about yet?
EH: The people I was working with—they were hell-bent for leather, as my grandfather would say, to give you something worth your time. It's not an audiobook, it's not a radio play, and it's not a movie; it's something else. That was the challenge for all of us involved, and the people working on it did a great job.
KJ: You've been at a point in your career for so long where you can choose what you want to do and what appeals to you. Is there anything you are dying to do that you haven't done yet or anything on the horizon that you're excited about?
EH: I'm excited about a lot of different things. One thing for me right now that’s really exciting is watching my kids grow up. It's so cliche, but it's so interesting. My daughter, Maya Hawke, is on Stranger Things right now and she's releasing an album. It's so exciting to watch young people develop. My son is acting and playing music and experiencing the world as a totally new thing—as an adult life, it's totally new, and it makes it new for me.
I can't believe that I've gotten to 52 and I've never been asked to do a bald-face comedy. I'd really like to do something stupid. I want to do something really funny and silly. I would like to do that, and I want to go back on stage. I just saw Sam Rockwell and Lawrence Fishburne in American Buffalo the other night. It was my first time back at the theater since the pandemic happened, and I was like, "God, what a beautiful art form that is." I really want to get back on stage. I did True West on Broadway right before the pandemic. Just being in the theater and feeling the lights go black and feeling everybody holding their breath, turning off their dumb cell phones and just watching these human beings on stage—it felt like, "Ah, man, I want to do that."
KJ: That's a great play. Thank you so much for this, this has truly been such a pleasure. And I just want to say congratulations again on an incredible performance. Listeners, Fishpriest by Mike Batistick starring Ethan Hawke and a full cast is available on Audible now.
