Life after Uma

Ethan Hawke opens up about their heartbreaking split

Hawke stars with Angelina Jolie in the thriller 'Taking Lives', opening Friday.

Hawke with wife Uma Thurman in 2001.

Ethan Hawke is taking a talking cure.
Last fall, rumors flew that the actor cheated on wife Uma Thurman with a twentysomething model in Montreal while filming the thriller "Taking Lives," which opens on Friday.

Since then, he has lost his marriage, privacy and 15 pounds due to stress.

"The nice thing about being married for five years is that Uma and I dropped off the tabloid radar," he tells the Daily News. "I always knew that the way we would get back on it would be if something bad happened."

But while many public figures choose to keep mum when their marriages go south, Hawke has been making media rounds to talk about the bustup.

"We'll probably get a divorce," he has told reporters freely. The couple has two children, Maya, 5, and Roan, 2.

In an interview last week on ABC's "20/20," he pleaded that it was "difficult for any couple who are married if both people are very ambitious.

"In a marriage, somebody's gotta ride shotgun. If both people want to drive ... eventually you might have to say, 'You know what? We gotta take two cars.'"

Hawke says his talking about the breakup is a strategy to help him heal and move on.

But now the 33-year-old actor - who's prone to knitted brows and lengthy, complex responses to queries - insists he's done spilling dirt on the split.

"I tried being as honest as I could … I just sincerely feel like moving on."

Sitting cross-legged on a desk in a midtown hotel suite, Hawke blows smoke from American Spirits out a balcony door.

"If you have to read about yourself in the paper all the time and have it be primarily negative, you have a desire to bring the conversation back to some equilibrium," he says.

"Silence is often a very powerful tool so I used that for a while.

"But I haven't known whether to avoid the questions or answer them." Thurman, star of the "Kill Bill" movies, has already been romantically linked to hotelier Andre Balazs.

But Hawke, who met and pursued Thurman on the set of the 1997 sci-fi flick "Gattaca," told The News love isn't on his short-term schedule. He says he's spending as much time as possible with his children before going to ­Toronto next month to begin work on the action movie "Assault on Precinct 13."

"All I care about right now is raising my kids right," he says. "I'm not worrying about anything else.

"I hang with my kids and play the guitar and go to the Knicks game. Those are the kinds of things I do to relax."

Hawke has written two novels, "Ash Wednesday" (2002) and "The Hottest State" (1996). He says writing fiction relieves stress, too, but his kids come first.

In "Taking Lives," which co-stars Angelina Jolie, he plays a witness to a serial killer's crime.

"I studied some serial killers for this part and what is amazing to me is their belief in their own innocence," says Hawke, who got an Oscar nomination for his performance in the 2001 cop drama "Training Day."

"They still feel they're a good person. It's kind of frightening, because we all go through life like, 'I'm a good person.' But a lot of wrong is done and it's done by people who believe that."

He'll be back on the big screen in June with "Before Sunset," Richard Linklater's sequel to 1995's train romance "Before Sunrise" that reunites Hawke with Julie Delpy.

Both actors share writing credit with Linklater for the followup, which - perhaps not coincidentally - features Hawke's character struggling with a marriage that changed after a having a child.

Official site >Before Sunset<

BEFORE SUNSET REVIEWS

• Variety: "Before Sunset" is a savvy sequel that should speak to anyone who's let that one great love slip away. Cleverly playing on his real-life rep as a sometimes scribbler, Hawke deftly balances glimpses of the goofy, grunge-era Jesse from the original with the more successful, if no less satisfied, adult he's become. Delpy infuses Celine with a mixture of coquettishness and gravitas that makes her seem still somehow wiser and more mature than Jesse. It's a credit to both thesps that their intervening stardom hasn't diluted their comfort with these characters and each other..."

• Hollywood Reporter: "This is one of the most wildly romantic movies in ages. Few American films have the courage to rely entirely on dialogue and subtext for story. These filmmakers make certain they have nothing else to fall back upon. To be sure, the two actors are pleasing to watch indeed, a brief flashback to the first movie establishes they may be better looking now than then. The trio has made a wise film about how age works on people. Life has taught each a few things in the intervening years, so they look at people and options in a different light. Shot in just 15 days on a tight budget, this is an accomplished bit of guerrilla filmmaking. Cinematographer Lee Daniel's long camera takes are smooth and unobtrusive, the actors appear relaxed, and the chemistry between them is excellent. Even Delpy's songs are not bad at all..."

• Backstage: "Berlin Film Festival goers got a welcome relief from the wet gray weather and the mostly underwhelming movies of offer in this year's competition when Richard Linklater's "Before Sunset" screened Tuesday to an enthusiastic and grateful Berlin crowd of journalists and critics. Linklater and the film's stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, received a standing ovation at the press conference following the screening, with international journalists welcoming the talent like old friends..."

• Telegraph: "Like Before Sunrise, it's almost all dialogue between them, and it's fascinating to see them together again, nine years older, like a fictional version of television's 7-Up documentaries. The chemistry between them remains strong, but it feels richer and deeper now, illuminating the ways that their lives have changed. In their twenties, they were full of dreams about the future; in their thirties, they're already looking back on regrets, wrong turns, disappointments..."

• Indie Wire: "Above all, though it's been tightly scripted, "Sunset" is a tour de force of spontaneity and naturalness. Hawke, looking slightly worn about the eyes, talks about being "bummed," and unhappy "24/7" and sounds uncannily like the Jesse we've met before. As for Delpy, she doesn't speak lines - she pours out language with a quicksilver charm. The film is a must-see if only for her seductive enactment of a Nina Simone performance that holds the viewer - and Jesse - in her thrall. In fact, the whole film plays like performance - improv in a theater. In that sense, it pushes Linklater's interest in innovative form in yet another new direction. The actors ride the energy and live in the moment - just as the characters aspire to live in the moment - hit the ground running and never let up. It's filmmaking as one gorgeous uninterrupted gesture..."

• Reuters: "Many other films, such as a widely applauded love story "Before Sunset" between an American novelist played by Ethan Hawke and a French environmental worker played by Julie Delpy, evenly balanced their male and female lead characters. "Any actress will tell you 'I'm tired of being the girlfriend who laughs at stupid jokes from guys'," said American director Richard Linklater in an interview. "A lot of things are seen through a male perspective. This movie, I'm proud to say, is 50-50. Julie's character is so strong." Delpy, who also co-wrote "Before Sunset", told Reuters she believes women will ascend even further in the near future. "Definitely," Delpy said. "For example, my next project I wrote, direct and star in is a very strong role. It's so strong that some men are terrified when they read the script. It's vital for women to be more active, and show how strong women are."

>News Arhive<