Ethan Hawke experienced "one of the hardest summers" of his life filming The Weight.
The 55-year-old star plays down-on-his-luck widower Samuel Murphy in the new movie that is set during the Great Depression and revealed how some scenes pushed him to the limit physically, even though it wasn't a typical action picture.
Ethan told Entertainment Weekly: "This was one of the hardest summers of my life. Being in the water, being in the woods, I keep saying, 'Oh, it's an action movie without that much action', but it was exhausting. Just worrying about the ticks alone."
The Reality Bites star revealed that the idea for The Weight stemmed from him contemplating a lack of "character-driven action movies" when he directed the 2022 documentary series The Last Movie Stars, which centred on Hollywood greats Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Hawke recalled: "This started very strangely when I was doing the Newman-Woodward doc. I was watching all these older movies, and I got thinking about why there was a genre of action movie that was around in the '60s and '70s that were character-driven action movies.
"There were action movies where not a lot of s*** blows up. They're about people, but they're high stakes."
He then decided to join forces with director Padraic McKinley to pay homage to a bygone style of film.
The Blue Moon actor said: "We started riffing on why there aren't any great Paul Newman, Steve McQueen kind of action movies anymore. I was like, before I get too old, I really wanna make one."
Ethan explained how the character of Murphy – who is taken from his daughter to serve a prison sentence in 1930s Oregon – is "old-fashioned".
He said: "It's an old-fashioned idea of the principled man.
"I'm really interested in trying to put forth a story right now about positive manifestations of masculinity, and like, what is dignity, empowering others, taking care of others, fatherhood, serving. Those kinds of old-fashioned principles, and then set them in an action genre, and have a person's integrity tested."
Hawke revealed that it is the type of role he has been pursuing for his entire career.
The five-time Oscar nominee said: "My whole career, I've had things in my brain where I see a kind of character I haven't been able to play before that I think I can, and I'm out hunting for it."
The Weight was filmed over a six-week period in the Bavarian forests in Germany last year and Hawke explained that the production brought back memories of appearing in the 1991 film White Fang, where he shot in Alaska for six months.
He said: "When I was a kid, I did this movie, White Fang, where I went to Alaska for six months.
"It was so romantic. It was a life-changing experience for me. And I'm still hungry for this kind of experience where you take a camera into the wild and come out with a movie."
