Welcome to “Playback,” a Variety / iHeartRadio podcast bringing you exclusive conversations with the talents behind many of today’s hottest films. Oscar-nominated actor Ethan Hawke is as prolific as ever. He sauntered into Sundance in January with two films in tow — the Blaze Foley biopic “Blaze” (a directorial effort) and the Nick Hornby adaptation “Juliet, Naked” (a starring one). Releasing amid the summer blockbuster fireworks will be writer-director Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed,” the portrait of a pastor haunted by grief and heavier thoughts, a Bressonian figure that made for one of the ripest opportunities of Hawke’s career. Read More here

Ethan Hawke describes the first time he met Christian Slater — filling in Friday for Kathie Lee — at only 14-years-old. Hawke’s new film, “Blaze,” tells the story of “self-destructive” country musician Blaze Foley, who was shot and killed in 1989. Read More here

An interview with actor Ethan Hawke, who brought his upcoming directorial effort, “Blaze,” to SIFF Cinema Egyptian in Seattle. Read More here

Blumhouse Television is developing a limited series based on James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award-winning novel “The Good Lord Bird,” Variety has learned. Ethan Hawke is on board to star as abolitionist leader John Brown, and will co-write the script with Mark Richard (“Fear of the Walking Dead”). Read More here

Hollywood star Ethan Hawke says he wanted to make a film about someone “nobody’s heard of” when he wrote and directed Blaze — a biopic on the life of musician Blaze Foley. “The subtext of it is you’re celebrating regular life — that’s a beautiful thing — and a lot of what makes biopics TV movies is they are constantly tipping their hat to the trope of the famous person,” Hawke said. “So what I try to do is take this beautiful poet-singer-songwriter, Blaze Foley, who never made it and make a meaningful work of art for you … about his life.”

The title of First Reformed, Paul Schrader’s best film in a very long time, refers to an old abolitionist church in upstate New York, a metaphor for Christianity’s neglected values. The First Reformed has no congregation to speak of, only visitors and tourists, and its care has fallen into the hands of a lost soul, the gentle, hollow-cheeked Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke, in one of his most moving performances). He is God’s clinically depressed man—a former military chaplain, an alcoholic haunted by his son’s death in the Iraq War, privately humiliated by the example of Christ and the stern Dutch ministers who once hid runaway slaves under the floorboards of this small clapboard church. Read More here

Actor and filmmaker Ethan Hawke boasts a long and storied career in television, film and theater. This year, Hawke has once again stepped onto the big screen for not just one, but three movies: a romantic comedy called “Juliet, Naked”; a music biography called “Blaze”; and the drama, “First Reformed.” “First Reformed,” directed by Paul Schrader, stars Hawke as a former military chaplain. Read More here

In a summer movie season dominated by superhero and sci-fi extravaganzas, First Reformed is that rare release — an austere and complex tale about a pious man’s mounting crisis of faith. It’s also, more crucially still, on the shortlist of the year’s best films, a challenging masterwork about anguish and salvation from one of the medium’s most celebrated artists: Paul Schrader, famed for penning Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, and for writing and directing (among others) Hardcore, American Gigolo, Cat People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Affliction, and Auto Focus. Formally rigorous and deeply felt, it’s an exceptional Ethan Hawke-headlined drama that plays like both a tribute to the movies that have long inspired him (by Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, and modern Ida auteur Pawel Pawlikowski) and a companion piece to his own oeuvre — something that, Schrader readily admits, is intentional. Read More here