He made his Broadway debut in 1992 in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2007 for his performance in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia.

[11] Hawke obtained his mother's permission to attend his first casting call at the age of 14,[14] and secured his first film role in Joe Dante's Explorers (1985), in which he played an alien-obsessed schoolboy alongside River Phoenix.

"[13] In 1989, Hawke made his breakthrough appearance in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society, playing one of the students taught by Robin Williams as a charismatic English teacher.

[21] Hawke later described the opportunities he was offered as a result of the film's success as critical to his decision to continue acting: I didn't want to be an actor and I went back to college.

[23] In the survival drama Alive (1993), adapted from Piers Paul Read's 1974 non-fiction book, Hawke portrayed Nando Parrado, one of the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes.

"[32] The New York Times thought Hawke did "a fine job of showing what it's like to be young and full of confusion", concluding that The Hottest State was ultimately "a sweet love story".

[36] In 1998, Hawke appeared alongside Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro in Great Expectations, a contemporary film adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel of the same name, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

[41] Set in the Pacific Northwest and featuring a love affair between a European-American man and Japanese-American woman, the film met with an unenthusiastic reception;[42] Entertainment Weekly noted, "Hawke scrunches himself into such a dark knot that we have no idea who Ishmael is or why he acts as he does.

[60] The New York Times noted that in the book Hawke displayed "a novelist's innate gifts ... a sharp eye, a fluid storytelling voice and the imagination to create complicated individuals", but was "weaker at narrative tricks that can be taught".

Upon release, Taking Lives received broadly negative reviews,[63] but Hawke's performance was favored by critics, with the Star Tribune noting that he "plays a complex character persuasively.

[79] In 2009, Hawke appeared in two features: New York, I Love You, a romance movie comprising 12 short films,[80] and Staten Island, a crime drama co-starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Seymour Cassel.

[84] The film opened in March to a mediocre reception,[85] yet his performance was well received, with the New York Daily News concluding, "Hawke—continuing an evolution toward stronger, more intense acting than anyone might've predicted from him 20 years ago—drives the movie.

[86] He then starred opposite Kristin Scott Thomas in Paweł Pawlikowski's The Woman in the Fifth, a "lush puzzler" about an American novelist struggling to rebuild his life in Paris.

[90] Like its predecessors, the film garnered a considerable degree of critical acclaim;[91] Variety wrote that "one of the great movie romances of the modern era achieves its richest and fullest expression in Before Midnight," and called the scene in the hotel room "one for the actors' handbook.

In this modern war film, Hawke played a drone pilot with a troubled conscience, which led to The Hollywood Reporter calling it his "best screen role in years.

[113] His portrayal of Baker was well received; Rolling Stone noted that "Everything that makes Ethan Hawke an extraordinary actor — his energy, his empathy, his fearless, vanity-free eagerness to explore the deeper recesses of a character — is on view in Born to Be Blue.

"[114] In Rebecca Miller's romantic comedy Maggie's Plan, Hawke starred as an anthropologist and aspiring novelist alongside Greta Gerwig and Julianne Moore.

[116] In 2016, Hawke starred in Ti West's western film In a Valley of Violence, in which he played a drifter seeking revenge in a small town controlled by its Marshal (John Travolta).

[117] He then portrayed two unpleasant characters in a row, first as the abusive father of a talented young baseball player in The Phenom, then as the harsh husband of Maud Lewis (played by Sally Hawkins) in Maudie.

[126] In Juliet, Naked, a romantic comedy adapted from Nick Hornby's novel of the same name, he appeared as an obscure rock musician whose eponymous album set the plot in motion.

[135] In 2022, Hawke starred as the primary villain Arthur Harrow in the Disney+ streaming series Moon Knight, produced by Marvel Studios,[136] and as serial killer of children The Grabber in the Blumhouse feature, The Black Phone.

[137] Also that year, he appeared in Robert Eggers' The Northman, a 10th-century Viking epic which was filmed in Ireland, alongside Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Willem Dafoe.

[8][145] Outside the New York stage, Hawke made an appearance in a 1995 production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, directed by Gary Sinise at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.

"[148] Ben Brantley of The New York Times reported that Hawke's interpretation of Hotspur might be "too contemporary for some tastes," but allowed "great fun to watch as he fumes and fulminates.

[150] The New York Times critic Brantley praised Hawke's performance as the central character Eddie, reporting that "he captures with merciless precision the sense of a sharp mind turning flaccid".

[151] From November 2006 to May 2007, Hawke starred as Mikhail Bakunin in Tom Stoppard's trilogy play The Coast of Utopia, an eight-hour-long production at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York.

[157] The Cherry Orchard won a mixed review from the New York Daily News, which wrote "Ethan Hawke ... fits the image of the 'mangy' student Trofimov, but one wishes he didn't speak with a perennial frog in his throat.

[162] In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley noted the production's "scary, splendid clarity", and praised Hawke for eliciting a performance that "connoisseurs of precision acting will be savoring for years to come".

[164] Entertainment Weekly commented that although A Lie of the Mind "wobbles a bit in its late stages", Hawke's "hearty" revival managed to "resurrect the spellbinding uneasiness of the original".

I see Michael Chabon write a great book; when I see Philip Seymour Hoffman do Death of a Salesman last year—I see people of my generation being fully realized in their work, and I find that really kind of exciting.