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Ethan Hawke shared rare comments about the difficulties of divorce, 20 years after his breakup with ex-wife Uma Thurman.
The Blue Moon actor spoke about going through a split as a public figure during a wide-ranging interview with U.K. outlet The Times.
“The public eye is like gasoline,” said Hawke, 55, “but what makes divorce hard is the stuff that makes it hard for everyone: the family elements, how to help the kids through it.”
“I’m so envious of people who have amicable splits,” Hawke told The Times. “I can’t really talk about this because I vowed to my kids so many times not to talk about the divorce in public.”
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He added, “But one thing I will say is if you get the privilege of traveling the world, you realize that everywhere men and women have a tremendous amount of difficulty staying married.”
Hawke and Thurman, 55, married in 1998, and she later filed for divorce in 2004. They share two kids, daughter Maya, 27, and son Levon, 23.
The Training Day actor later married wife Ryan, 42, in 2008, and they share daughters Clementine, 17, and Indiana, 14.
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Hawke also told the outlet that before meeting Ryan, he didn’t intend to remarry or expand his family after his Thurman divorce: “When I split up I was hellbent on not having any more kids and I wanted to be single for the rest of my life. But then I made a best friend and I liked kissing her.”
In the years since his divorce, Hawke has called the attention on their split “humiliating,” and he said he went through a depression directly after the breakup.
“I got divorced and my personal life fell apart,” he told GQ in 2018. “I don’t know if you feel this way, but when you’re depressed it’s really easy to see everything that is fake about other people and life, and I just started seeing all that. How phony celebrity was, how phony everything is.”
Work, theater and his kids, Hawke said, helped him through that time. “That’s the wonderful thing about children is they just need you every day. It gives your life balance. Meaning your whole life isn’t just about yourself,” he explained.
Thurman has rarely spoken about her split with Hawke. Back in 2006, the Kill Bill star told Parade magazine, “I cannot participate in anything critical about my children’s father. I just need to keep peace. I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t said one mean thing, and I’m not going to start now. It’s terrible for my family.”
