Ethan Hawke Talks Tommy Lee Jones and The Strokes with Drew Barrymore
Ethan Hawke came to his Drew Barrymore interview wearing the uniform — a bolo tie he borrowed from the aesthetic of The Lowdown, the FX series whose second season is airing right now — and by the end of the conversation he had delivered one of the clearest accounts yet of what Tommy Lee Jones brings to the show. Jones plays Lee Raybon Sr., the estranged father of Hawke's Tulsa bookstore owner and citizen journalist, in a role FX announced in March that trade press have described as his first scripted television part in nearly four decades. Hawke, an Austin native, said growing up on Lonesome Dove made Jones the great Texan actor of his childhood, so having him play his father carried a weight that felt personal beyond the job. What impressed him most, he added, is that Jones is not there for a token appearance — he delivers a substantial performance that lands hard across the season.
The role makes sense for a show that has quietly become one of FX's best-reviewed series. Created by Sterlin Harjo, The Lowdown premiered September 23, 2025, with an eight-episode first season that currently sits at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and 87 on Metacritic. Season 2 opened October 14 on FX and Hulu with two episodes and runs eight episodes weekly through the fall. Hawke described Jones as stoic and genuinely formidable in person — Barrymore, who worked with Jones on Batman Forever back in 1995, remembered the same energy — while noting his résumé is almost absurdly broad: Harvard football, a famous roommate in Al Gore, years of sailing the world. In a small Tulsa bookstore drama, that gravitas is the point.
The conversation also landed on the adaptation Hawke has queued up at home. He admitted he had somehow gone through life as a James Dean fan and a Steinbeck reader without ever finishing East of Eden, and that the Netflix series finally forced his hand — he finished John Steinbeck's novel two days before the interview and called the ending one of the greatest ever written, a rare case of the hype holding up. The seven-episode Netflix limited series, which premiered October 1 with Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist, was created and written by Zoe Kazan — Elia Kazan's granddaughter, and thus the inheritor of the story her grandfather brought to the screen in 1955. Hawke said he owed it to Kazan as a friend to read the book before watching her version, and he has a specific claim to that friendship: he directed her and Paul Dano in the 2007 Off-Broadway play Things We Want, where the two met, fell in love and built a family. He considers himself their matchmaker, which made the viewing homework a duty of honor.
Rounding out the appearance were the two habits that revealed the most about where his head is at. At 18, his son informed him that The Strokes had put out a new album — news to the man who considers them his band and who has credited them with saving rock and roll since the early 2000s. That record, Reality Awaits, arrived July 24, and Hawke said seeing the band live recently confirmed they still play at full force. Barrymore, for her part, told him she dated the band's drummer for five years, a piece of trivia that perfectly closed a conversation where a New York rocker, a Steinbeck epic and a stoic Texan legend all crossed paths in the same hour. Between The Lowdown's second season, Netflix's East of Eden and a new Strokes record, Hawke's watchlist and his playlist have rarely been this aligned.
