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Ethan Hawke is remembering how the late Robin Williams would often retreat to himself in between takes on the set of Dead Poets Society.
In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning on Dec. 9, Hawke acknowledged that he was just a teenager when the movie was filmed but still understood that Williams was a complex human being, saying the film was “a teaching for me.”
“Even at 18, I was aware of the complexity of his emotional life,” Hawke, now 55, said of his late co-star.
“I’ve had a lot of depression in my family, and it was obvious to me that all that power and that charisma came at a certain cost. He was a deeply, deeply sensitive person who was highly attuned to the energy of a room,” Hawke added.
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The two co-starred in the 1989 film, in which Williams played John Keating, an eccentric English professor at an all-boys school who develops a deep bond with his students.
Hawke plays Todd Anderson, who kicks the whole story off when he starts attending the school.
Speaking to CBS, Hawke said that Williams’ death “does not fundamentally change the way I watch the movie.”
Hawke recalled one instance in which Williams was “making up lines and everybody was laughing and everybody was praising him.” Later, when Hawke went to get a snack, he found Williams “hiding in the corner, in the dark, by himself.”
“I thought, ‘Oh, OK. It makes a lot more sense to me now, actually’” Hawke said. “It was a lot. It was taxing. There’s a lot of stories about clowns and the happiness that they give and at what cost.”
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Hawke continued: “So I say all that to say, the end of his life does not define his life to me. And when I watch the movie, I think of the spirit of the man I knew in those days and how powerful it was and how much he weathered that storm of his psyche for us and for other people. I learned tremendously that there aren’t two of him.”
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In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Hawke said that directing Williams was “not an easy thing to do” for the film’s director Peter Weir, because he used so much improvisation.
“Robin Williams didn’t do the script, and I didn’t know you could do that. If he had an idea, he just did it. He didn’t ask permission,” Hawke told the outlet. “And that was a new door that was opened to my brain, that you could play like that.”
Williams would go on to become one of the world’s most beloved icons following the film. After struggling with an undiagnosed case of the debilitating brain disorder Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), the prolific actor and comedian died by suicide at age 63 on Aug. 11, 2014, at his Paradise Cay mansion in San Francisco.
