Earlier this year, John Hawkes stepped into the national spotlight as the dark horse nominee for the Academy Awards’ Best Supporting Actor Oscar, thanks to his haunting and heartbreaking performance in Debra Granik’s Ozarks noir Winter’s Bone. While he didn’t win the Oscar that night, some say his latest role, as an equally alluring and menacing figure in the Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene, will soon score Hawkes his second shot at Oscar gold. Like Winter’s Bone, this gritty drama centers on a young woman plagued by troubles, with Hawkes in a crucial supporting role. In this case, Hawkes plays Patrick, the devilishly charismatic leader of an upstate New York cult, who lures in Martha (Elizabeth Olsen in a star-making debut) by promising the love-starved young woman a sense of community and family.
I recently sat down with Hawkes, who greeted me with a warm handshake and an easy smile, and asked him about his craft, his inspirations, his favorite cult movie, and the layered Martha Marcy May Marlene.
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The Film Stage: What drew you to Martha Marcy May Marlene?
John Hawkes: Well, I wasn’t really looking for a cult story…It just feels like an overdone topic. So I wasn’t really excited to read the script knowing what it was about. Then a few pages in, I was hooked. It’s really well-written. It’s a very different viewpoint than you tend to see with this kind of story, filled with different characters than you usually see with this kind of story, and different circumstances with a different timeline to it. You know, it’s less about her getting in [to the cult], and more about her concern of getting out and those harrowing moments after escaping. I’m always just looking for a story that draws me in. I’m looking for great people who are going to tell that story. I’m looking for a great role within that story. You know, it’s Sean Durkin’s first feature, but reading the script and talking to him on the phone I was able to — I felt this was a person I could trust. [After that call] I was eager to work with him, and I wanted to be a part of it.
It was an interesting role because I play a leader of men, someone who others gather behind, and follow. That intrigued me. I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. My first impression was to fight the normal cult leader cliché, if there is one. I feel like there is. You see a lot of times this scene-chewing personification of pure evil. I wasn’t interested in that for a couple of reasons. One is that we’ve seen it before…I’m not really interested in Charles Manson or anything like that. That’s something that’s really overdone and overvalued and overemphasized in our world. It seemed most important to the story itself to make Patrick a different kind of leader, to make Patrick a guy who you believe in. Who you could conceivably follow — or at least in your mind’s eye as an audience member — understand why this young woman might follow him, why people might follow him. It makes [Martha] a much more interesting and credible character. I mean, she’s the lead in the film and you have to be with her for every frame of the film, you need to be with her the whole movie. And [you won’t be with her] if she’s some kind of impressionable dimwit who wasn’t able to see – what we as an audience all saw – that this guy is some obvious Svengali kind of con man. Well you do the opposite to make [Martha] a credible and believable human being, which is what we attempted. It gives her character credibility; it makes her smarter. It makes her a more interesting character.
In the film Patrick re-names the young women that come to live on his farm. What for you is his purpose or thought process in this?
I think it might be a couple of things…I think most importantly it’s a way of exercising control. To actually take someone’s given name, a name they’ve lived with their whole lives and give them a new name, it’s going to open a lot of doors to begin with. It is going to open doors like, breaking down the person’s personality in order to give them a new one. It’s also whimsical. I think it’s fun and funny for him and the other characters in a way —
Almost like a nickname, a sign of affection?
Yes! Yeah, you know like how Bush gave all his [people] different nicknames?
Or like in [Tod Browning’s] Freaks? “One of us! One of us!”
(Laughing) Yes! That’s an interesting question. No one’s asked that.
Within the past year, a number of films you’ve played a part in have opened with varying degrees of success, from Winter’s Bone, which garnered you a well-deserved Oscar nod and was a hit with critics as well as a financial success, to Earthwork, which is also a great drama that drew praise from critics, yet didn’t really find an audience. When working on films, do you ever have a feeling as to whether they will hit or not? [Read our review of Earthwork.]
I do. I have some idea. It’s not like I can read and script and know ‘this script is going to win awards,’ or things like that. On the shoot you can often tell what’s going on, and when I watch it I know – to my mind – whether it’s a hit or a miss. But I don’t have my finger on the pulse of what an audience or an international audience might think.
All we can do when we’re creating things is try to sculpt, paint, dance, write things we would want to read, see, touch. One of the beautiful things about independent film is that it does that without apology or compromise. The only art that changes the world is when a person or a small group of people make the art that they want to make because it’s what they want to see and they’ll die if they don’t do it. The art that doesn’t change the world, which is most of what we have, is people guessing at what the audience might like. Occasionally I work on an independent film that seems to want to guess at what the audience is going to like and it’s very much a dead-end.
Sometimes you have a feeling that something – I’ve been in things that I thought were wonderful that have never found an audience for sure. But sometimes you have an idea that something good is happening. Debra Granik I just thought was phenomenal and plus Jennifer Lawrence was just terrific and I had a lot of the same feelings working on this film.
What is your favorite cult-adored movie?
Well, you mentioned Freaks…but that isn’t my favorite. Oh! Harold and Maude. I’d say it’s attained cult status and it’s one of my favorite films.
Martha Marcy May Marlene opens Friday, October 21st in select theaters.
Read our interview with Hawkes’ co-star Elizabeth Olsen here.
Check out our interview with Sean and producers Josh Mond, and Antonio Campos here.