<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Published in the February 2013 issue, on sale any day now Lunchtime, Crosby Street Hotel, downtown Manhattan. John Hawkes: I&amp;#039;ve been lookin&amp;#039; for you, man. Scott Raab: Been here since Tuesday. JH: There&amp;#039;s moss growing on your north side you&amp;#039;ve been here so long. I&amp;#039;m so sorry. SR: I won&amp;#039;t hear of it. Waitress: Is tap water okay for you? JH: I&amp;#039;m gonna be high maintenance. Still water in a bottle. Not a big bottle. [Wobbles table.] And can we fix the table somehow? I&amp;#039;m a little OCD. It&amp;#039;s gonna drive me nuts. Waitress: Is this better for you? JH: Perfect. Thank you. Livin&amp;#039; the dream. SR: I saw The Sessions yesterday. I cried a few times.   HBO/Everett Collection &amp;quot;People have made good lives out of borrowed ones before.&amp;quot; \u2014Deadwood, 2004-2006  JH: Me too. It may be a sign that I need professional help. SR: I think if you don&amp;#039;t cry, you might need professional help. JH: I&amp;#039;m a bit of a softie. SR: That movie is aimed straight at the heart. JH: If you&amp;#039;re just gonna see one iron-lung movie about a guy trying to lose his virginity this year, this is one of the better ones. SR: His condition is more than any of us are gonna have to deal with to get laid. JH: I think it makes him a really relatable character. &amp;#039;Cause if anyone&amp;#039;s been lucky enough to have a first time, and most of us have, they&amp;#039;re gonna understand this guy. SR: Is there any group of folks more invisible than people with disabilities? JH: The disabled are the last minority group that we&amp;#039;re gonna finally say, &amp;quot;We see you, and you have worth.&amp;quot; I grew up in the civil-rights era, and I was lucky enough to have teachers play me the Martin Luther King &amp;quot;I Have a Dream&amp;quot; speech, and to be told by my parents and my teachers from the time I was a little boy that all of us are equal no matter our color or creed, even though I grew up in a blond-haired, blue-eyed town, pretty much \u2014 a very Norwegian, white place in northern Minnesota. While I was being taught that, the disabled kids were in some room that I never saw. SR: Helen Hunt was marvelous. JH: The word brave is thrown around a little too freely, but I think it fits here. Helen made the joke the other night when someone said, &amp;quot;Helen Hunt gave a very brave performance.&amp;quot; Helen said, &amp;quot;I think that brave just means naked.&amp;quot; Disabled sex is an interesting thing to have gotten to address. The movie&amp;#039;s a weird sell because it&amp;#039;s very populist but with graphic nudity. It&amp;#039;s a very odd combo. SR: No penis, though. JH: I do take solace in the fact that there&amp;#039;s still a piece of me that&amp;#039;s kind of a mystery.   Fred Norris/HBO/Everett Collection &amp;quot;I believe the reason you&amp;#039;re looking at 2x4&amp;#039;s instead of paints is because of fuck you.&amp;quot; \u2014Eastbound &amp;amp;amp; Down, 2009-present  SR: When her character refers to your character&amp;#039;s penis as substantial, is that acting? JH: Again, some things have to remain a mystery. SR: I couldn&amp;#039;t resist. JH: I&amp;#039;ve got some big hands and big feet. And you know what that means. Big shoes and big gloves. SR: Are you able to judge your own performance? JH: I didn&amp;#039;t fuck it up terribly. That&amp;#039;s always my goal: Fail better next time. SR: Do you care about the Oscars? JH: On some level, I don&amp;#039;t care at all. I don&amp;#039;t know if our friends who are distributing the movie would be happy with my saying that, but it&amp;#039;s the honest truth. If it brings more people to the movie, then that&amp;#039;s cool. I have a reluctance about visibility, but I want to be a good soldier. SR: So it&amp;#039;s Esquire and Good Morning, Poughkeepsie? JH: Did the Today showthis morning. I said I would never do a talk show, but it went good. I grumbled and bitched the whole time going down there. It&amp;#039;s been a huge weapon to be unknown, and that&amp;#039;s slowly eroding, I guess, and I&amp;#039;m not helping it today. I have a bit of an elitist streak around the independent-film thing, but I also want people to see the work. It&amp;#039;s a tightrope to walk. If someone rents Winter&amp;#039;s Bone and they&amp;#039;d seen me on a talk show the night before, it&amp;#039;s gonna be a very different experience for them than just watching the movie. Very much a First World problem I&amp;#039;m describing here. SR: You&amp;#039;ve referred to acting as &amp;quot;pretending.&amp;quot; That seems overly simple. JH: Writing is the same, right? If you&amp;#039;re writing a book, you&amp;#039;re gonna sit there and pretend. I don&amp;#039;t mean to sell it short, but it&amp;#039;s true. SR: What did you do before you started working as an actor? JH: I was a confused carpenter in Austin in the early &amp;#039;80s. I would get sick of the heat and go wait tables, and then I&amp;#039;d get sick of the people and go back to carpentry. I was in a theater company. I was in bands. I made visual art. I got roped into modern-dance performances, and I was able to do all that while working 12 hours a week as a carpenter. SR: Where do you live now? JH: Los Angeles. I&amp;#039;m renting a house. It&amp;#039;s the nicest place I&amp;#039;ve ever lived in. SR: Nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labor. JH: My fruits are small fruits. I don&amp;#039;t do a lot of moneymaking gigs. Deadwood, Eastbound &amp;amp;amp; Down, these things paid money. Keeps a guy living in a nice house. Never had a new car. Never had an assistant. I own only one home. My mother lives in Minnesota and I bought it for her. I keep my nut low. Privation isn&amp;#039;t a bad thing. Extravagance may be a bad thing on some levels. So I&amp;#039;ve got a little extravagance, a little privation. I try to keep the two in balance.   Phoebe Sudrow/Film Flour/IFC/Kobal &amp;quot;In some cultures, when you burn yourself, it&amp;#039;s a ceremony. It&amp;#039;s called self-immolation. My uncle used to do it all the time.&amp;quot; \u2014Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005  SR: What do you drive? JH: I drive a hybrid SUV, but it&amp;#039;s not new. I&amp;#039;d rather someone else make sure it&amp;#039;s okay. Break it in for me. SR: Like a Ford Escape? JH: I&amp;#039;m embarrassed to say it&amp;#039;s a Lexus. SR: I could tell you were hesitant to say. JH: I am. SR: I don&amp;#039;t wanna embarrass you.   JH: I&amp;#039;m not gonna make myself out to be a guy who lives in a log cabin with no running water or electricity. But I have no e-mail. I have an understanding manager and an agent. If I need to read something, they&amp;#039;ll send it to me. And then I&amp;#039;ll recycle the paper. SR: When you got to the set of Winter&amp;#039;s Bone, you were working from an old script because you didn&amp;#039;t get an e-mail. Doesn&amp;#039;t that make you want to get e-mail? JH: Hell no. So I can triple the amount of people I can&amp;#039;t keep up with? Being ill-informed is a very small price to pay. I bought a computer a few years ago, and I really only played online poker till the FBI stopped us from being able to do that. I just called it the poker machine. I would flip her open and go to town. Now it&amp;#039;s an encyclopedia. Some of it&amp;#039;s true on there, some of it&amp;#039;s not true.   Molly Hawkey/Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re like a gigantic monster girl, going into town to cause damage and trouble.&amp;quot; \u2014Higher Ground, 2011  SR: Are you a good poker player? JH: No, but I study the game. I played in the World Series of Poker the last couple of Junes. You can sit at the table with people who are the best in the world \u2014 it&amp;#039;s like playing baseball with Mickey Mantle. SR: Going into this interview, I knew the characters you played, but I&amp;#039;m not sure I knew who you were. JH: That&amp;#039;s good. SR: Are you shy? JH: Let&amp;#039;s say that my favorite people aren&amp;#039;t the ones who are the life of the party. SR: Always been skinny? JH: I&amp;#039;ve weighed the same for 30 years. SR: The 120&amp;#039;s?   AF Archive/Alamy &amp;quot;Think of someone who hurt you, lied to you. Feel it. Feel how they made you feel. Let it build. Let it transfer to the gun.&amp;quot; \u2014Martha Marcy May Marlene, 2011  JH: The 140&amp;#039;s. SR: Do you work out? JH: I do yoga. I taught myself yoga out of a book. SR: I didn&amp;#039;t realize you were as old as you are. [Hawkes is 53.] You&amp;#039;re not a kid anymore. JH: Feel like one, but I&amp;#039;m not. SR: You have a boyish affect. JH: I&amp;#039;m takin&amp;#039; it to the grave, man. SR: But you&amp;#039;ve got a lot of great work ahead of you. JH: I hope so. We&amp;#039;ll see. I&amp;#039;m not being coy. Every time I have a job, I begin by saying, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know how to do this.&amp;quot; SR: I think a lot of people say yes to a lot of things out of the fear generated by that feeling. JH: I&amp;#039;m just pickin&amp;#039; my own path. It&amp;#039;s working out well for me. SR: In another interview, you referred to this year as a &amp;quot;sadly fallow&amp;quot; year for films. I like the phrase. JH: I said that? I love it! SR: You were reacting to five or six projects that hadn&amp;#039;t gotten funded. JH: American independent film&amp;#039;s in a pretty rough state. It&amp;#039;s paralleling our economy. Apparently, Alexander Payne didn&amp;#039;t have the easiest time funding Nebraska, a new script of his, which is fantastic. And he just made The Descendants. You gotta start over every time. SR: Did you get along with Shaq on the set of Steel? I got to know him a little bit while writing a book and I did not wind up loving him. JH: Let&amp;#039;s say I&amp;#039;m not a Lakers fan. SR: Are you a Timberwolves fan? JH: It&amp;#039;s been 30 years since I&amp;#039;ve lived there, but I like all the Minnesota teams. I haven&amp;#039;t gotten over it. SR: What are you supposed to do \u2014 become an Angels fan? If I move to Salt Lake City, would I convert to Mormonism? JH: Just because you live somewhere doesn&amp;#039;t mean you have to support the team. SR: Are you a reader? JH: I enjoy books quite a lot. SR: Anything stand out? JH: Knut Hamsun&amp;#039;s Hunger, I love that book. A lot of Sherwood Anderson&amp;#039;s short stories. Nathanael West. I&amp;#039;ve read all four of his books. The Day of the Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts... I read Michael Ondaatje long before there was an English Patient. In the Skin of a Lion&amp;#039;s a wonderful earlier work of his. Coming Through Slaughter. Check out Tom Drury. You&amp;#039;ll dig his work. The Driftless Area. Quite beautiful. And The End of Vandalism I really enjoyed too. D-R-U-R-Y. Good fella. Good fella. In Driftless Area, a character says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m behind. But that&amp;#039;s how I play.&amp;quot; I just like that line a lot. SR: You&amp;#039;re a serious reader. JH: I try to be. Not as much lately. Every once in a while I&amp;#039;ll get a job and I&amp;#039;ll be able to find a piece of fiction parallel enough that it makes sense for me to read it, or I&amp;#039;ll read what the character would read. Teardrop [from Winter&amp;#039;s Bone] wasn&amp;#039;t much of a book reader, so there was nothin&amp;#039; to do there. SR: Do you watch movies as intently as you read books? JH: I don&amp;#039;t see enough movies. It&amp;#039;s terrible. Haven&amp;#039;t seen any of the Godfather movies. SR: How is that possible? JH: Haven&amp;#039;t seen Casablanca, Gone with the Wind. SR: Why? JH: I don&amp;#039;t know! SR: Hawkes is a family name? JH: I think it was a married-in family name. There was someone with my real name, John Perkins, when I was doing the Actors&amp;#039; Equity union in 1986. I&amp;#039;d been rehearsing my first professional play for two weeks when a publicist comes in and says, &amp;quot;I just talked to the Equity representative. There&amp;#039;s someone with your name. You have to change it. We&amp;#039;re printing the program in a couple of hours, so let me know.&amp;quot; SR: Is Hawkes your legal name now? JH: Yeah. My mother said if I ever won an Academy Award, she&amp;#039;d change her name to Hawkes, too, so we&amp;#039;ll see. But I&amp;#039;m not winning any Academy Awards anytime soon. Not with the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis. SR: I haven&amp;#039;t seen that movie yet. JH: Nor I, but it&amp;#039;s a testament to his amazing skill that a poster with his picture on it is enough to garner a guaranteed nomination.... Please make sure the tongue&amp;#039;s out of the cheek on that one. I hold the guy in the highest esteem. The more great performances there are, then maybe it&amp;#039;s a party I get to skip. The whole deal makes me nervous. SR: You seem conflicted about your career and its trappings. JH: I don&amp;#039;t mean to seem ungrateful. My buddy Foster Timms, great songwriter back in L.A., has a song that goes, &amp;quot;Celebrities up in the hills live high on the hog, ticket buyers pay their bills and gape at them in awe.... [Warbles] Dadadada... they complain they got it rough, boo-fuckin&amp;#039;-hoo it must be tough. Save that shit for your shrink or your next movie, don&amp;#039;t tell us about the pain, show us the baby.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t wanna be one of those people in my buddy Foster&amp;#039;s song. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a18155/john-hawkes-interview-0213/>