Ethan Hawke on aging: Bring it on

NEW YORK — Back in 1992, Ethan Hawke had a small part in the drama Waterland, opposite Jeremy Irons.

He asked the Oscar winner whether it was even doable to be a working actor while also raising kids, or if it merely gave you ulcers.

"He said, 'It's what keeps me passionate about life,'" says Hawke, 44,and the father of four.

"Yeah, it makes it hard to arrange a shooting schedule. It's a reason to live. When I was younger, my whole focus in acting was so much more me-centric. It was me wanting to be noticed. The funny thing is, as you grow older, my relationship to acting has changed. My relationship with my children has become about what you want to put into the world and what kind of person you want to be. Kids watch the life you live. You can say 'follow your bliss' all you want, but if you don't do it, they see that."

Presciently, two of his current releases deal with what it means to be a parent. In awards darling Boyhood, directed by Hawke's close friend and frequent filmmaking partner Richard Linklater, he's the divorced Texas dad of two kids, imparting to them wisdom about birth control, politics and popular music. And in Predestination, opening Friday, he's a time-traveling agent who helps an unmarried mother (Sarah Snook) find her missing child.

"It speaks for itself, when you work with someone eight times," says Linklater. "Ethan is the best kind of collaborator. He pushes you in the right way. For Boyhood, he and I went through some phases in our lives. He was in the young-parent phase and that's when I asked him to do it. From the time we started Boyhood (in 2002), to when we finished (in 2013), he had three more kids. The parenting kicked in even bigger in his life. That was the whole point in the movie, to see this transformation. It's a portrait of parenting.''

Predestination was filmed amid Boyhood 's 12-year production cycle, which required Hawke and his co-star Patricia Arquette to shoot in Texas one week every 12 months.

"I flew to Australia with a mustache to do Predestination and the (directors) were like, 'Oh, that's cool.' It didn't occur to me that both movies were about time travel, in a very different way," says Hawke. "This movie is unapologetically out of its mind. The best time-travel piece of all time is Slaughterhouse-Five. I loved all that stuff. I read Lord of the Rings about 1,500 times growing up. My son is into it. I love science fiction because it's one of the few places where you can talk about radical notions."

Hawke, who has been famous since his breakthrough performance in 1989'sbeloved Dead Poets Society, has perspective when it comes to both his career and his life. He lives in Brooklyn with his second wife, Ryan, and daughters Clementine, 6, and Indiana, 3, and has Maya, 16, and Levon, 12, from his marriage to Uma Thurman. One of the not-so-great side-effects of hitting his 40s? Having his vision "go to ...'' he says with a smile, pulling on his dapper glasses for a photo shoot.

He understands the corrosive and futile nature of parental guilt, especially since two of his kids are the product of divorce.

"My mother was a single working mom. I learned so much watching her work hard. That's a valuable thing. My mom is happier now at 60 than she ever was in her life because she loves her work. She doesn't live her life for herself. She's working for gypsy rights in Eastern Europe," he says.

Hawke, too, is at a high point in his profession, weathering ups (a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for 2001's Training Day) and downs (2004's forgettable Taking Lives). It's very likely that Boyhood will get a best-picture nomination from the Academy, and Hawke is up for a supporting-actor Golden Globe.

"This has been the best creative period of my life. You go in and out of fashion,'' he says. "The hard thing is believing in yourself when you're out of fashion. The truth is, working with someone as gifted as Richard Linklater, that's actually easy. What's hard is being good on an episode of Matlock. They should give out Oscars for that."

The fulfillment he gets from his recent roles represents "20 years of work manifesting itself. Last year I got to do Macbeth. I have lived long enough now that with summer comes the winter."