Ethan Hawke made rare comments about his highly publicized split from ex-wife Uma Thurman.
“It’s humiliating,” Hawke, 54, said of their headline-making divorce during an interview with GQ U.K. published on Monday, September 1. “It’s almost humiliating even when they’re saying positive things.”
Thurman, 55, filed for divorce from Hawke in 2004 following their separation the year prior. The former couple, who tied the knot in 1998 and share daughter Maya, 27, and son Levon, 23, finalized their split in 2005.
Hawke and Thurman met while filming their 1997 film Gattaca. When asked why actors “often fall in love on set,” the Black Phone star told the outlet, “Have you ever played Spin the Bottle?”
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“There’s a certain intimacy to the work that we do. Imaginative intimacy,” Hawke continued. “It’s such a high. It feels dangerous and thrilling. It turns the temperature up in your life. It can be like falling in love at summer camp. It doesn’t have any connection to the dailiness of real life. That’s the danger of it.”
In a previous interview with GQ, Hawke admitted that his “personal life fell apart” following his split from Thurman.
“In a lot of ways, it could have been the beginning of something. It was the best moment of my career. Like, maybe, maybe, you could be commercially viable,” he said. “But I got divorced and my personal life fell apart. I don’t know if you feel this way, but when you’re depressed, it’s really easy to see everything that is fake about other people and life, and I just started seeing all that. How phony celebrity was, how phony everything is. You channel your inner Holden Caulfield, you know?”
Hawke said that filming his 2004 romance Before Sunset helped him through his difficult time.
“That was the height of my marriage falling apart,” he continued. “And getting to spend that summer with Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater, reconnecting with a part of myself that was more … what’s the right word? Idealized. A cleaner self. That was a great summer. And it really helped me put myself back together.”
Following his split from Thurman, Hawke married Ryan Shawhughes in 2008. The two are parents to daughters Clementine, 17, and Indiana, 14.
Meanwhile, Thurman was previously married to Gary Oldman from 1990 to 1992 and engaged to André Balazs from 2003 to 2007. She was also engaged to Arpad Busson, with whom she shares daughter Luna, 13, from 2008 to 2014.
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Thurman refused to speak poorly about Hawke following their divorce, telling Parade in 2006, “I cannot participate in anything critical about my children’s father. I just need to keep peace. I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t said one mean thing, and I’m not going to start now. It’s terrible for my family.”
In 2015, Hawke opened up about coparenting with Thurman during a Q&A session in New York City.
“One of the things that’s really hard about parenting from a divorced standpoint, is that your kids can wreak havoc over you because there is a lot of, ‘At Mommy’s house we have ice cream all the time’ and ‘I don’t think I’m going to come next weekend,’” he explained. “There are rules at school, rules at Grandma’s house, rules at Mom’s house, rules at Dad’s house, nobody’s bad or has the right rules, they are just rules. So [Ryan and I] got on this riff about rules.”