<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n Born and raised in rural Minnesota, John Hawkes, 52, had been acting for a quarter-century before he scored his hard-earned breakthrough. For a man known for playing gritty men with tough histories, it feels like an appropriate path. After garnering some attention for two roles\u2014as Sol Star on HBO's Deadwood and in Miranda July's 2005 feature Me and You and Everyone You Know\u2014he was cast in sixteen different films over the next five years, becoming a character actor of uncommon integrity. In 2010, his career broke wide open. As Teardrop, a meth addict in Debra Granik's Ozarks thriller Winter Bone, Hawkes was both villain and guide to Jennifer Lawrence's lost young woman\u2014a capricious, vicious man who has somehow held onto a personal code. He was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor and rode that momentum into a terrifyingly seductive turn as Patrick, the cult leader of Martha Marcy May Marlene. There's already Oscar buzz for his starring role in the upcoming The Surrogate, in which he plays a man in an iron lung looking to lose his virginity. But in that he's all good; we're here to talk about playing bad.\n\n\n\n\n\nGQ: What scared you as a kid?\n\n John Hawkes: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. That movie terrified me!\n\nGQ: What scared you so much?\n\n John Hawkes: Well, if you look at it now it's almost hokey in parts, but as a child I grew up in the country, and the idea that all these creatures that I considered friends could just turn on you\u2014gather in a group and cause mayhem. It seemed real to me.\n\n GQ: Do you have a favorite fictional villain?**\n\n John Hawkes: **The most interesting villain is Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. It's a very influential character, and I think kind of signaled the death knell of the innocence of the Flower Power movement, ushering in a punk sensibility in music and art. There was something almost sexy about Mcdowell's performance that was very attractive. It's an influential piece and such an interesting character.\n\nGQ: Which performances first made you want to play a villain?\n\n John Hawkes: I was fairly young when I saw the movie Something Wild. It was one of Ray Liotta's first film roles, and something about watching him made me want to do that. He's just deliciously bad\u2014so evil, so rough. But he avoids clich\u00E9 and plays it all with such interesting colors. But way more informative to me than other actors, I think, were the people I grew up with in my small town\u2014people who were older than me, who frightened me. There's a couple of people that I've looked to over the years to try to remember how they walked or moved, or, you know, held their glare. It's nice to sometimes get things out of life, rather than stealing from other artists. I'm trying to steal from the real people.\n\n GQ: Can you give me any examples?\n\n John Hawkes: I grew up in Alexandria, Minnesota and there were a lot of interesting characters to draw from. There were family friends, and people that certainly weren't family friends that were very scary, very unpredictable. I've used many of them for my work, but particularly two brothers. They were way older than they should have been for the grades they were in. One would hold you and the other one would take off his prosthetic leg and beat you with it mercilessly. They were threatening and you knew that your time could come when you turned a corner in the hallway, or waited for the bus, or whatever. I used to have nightmares about that, honestly.\n\nGQ: What scares you most now?\n\n John Hawkes: Birds. No, I'm kidding. My fear now is of clich\u00E9, of complacency, of not being able to feel authenticity in myself and those around me.\n\nGQ: Is there a living actor who you feel embodies evil better than any other?\n\n John Hawkes: There's a lot of them. I think of Daniel Day-Lewis, who can do just about anything. Robert Duvall was an amazing misunderstood villain in To Kill a Mockingbird, and a really despicable father in The Great Santini. Viggo Mortensen would be another favorite. He's another guy who can do anything, and I feel like he's got so much vulnerability and kindness and strength about him, that when he turns bad it's really frightening.\n\nGQ: Has a villain ever appeared in your dreams?\n\n John Hawkes: I don't believe so, though in one memorable dream I was riding my bicycle and Chuck Norris called me out, and I hopped off and beat the shit out of him. I know that would never happen in real life.\n\nGQ: I love that dream. When you played Teardrop in Winter's Bone, how much of the role was on the page and how much did you bring to it?\n\n John Hawkes: There was a novel by Daniel Woodrell that I learned a lot from. The fight with Teardrop for me was to keep his edge. The script was rewritten several times and, since I don't have e-mail\u2014that's my own fault\u2014I realized that for two months I'd been studying a script that was about nine drafts behind. So when I got the most recent draft and Teardrop had been softened, I fought to bring back his edge, and that is really to the story's benefit, to my mind. If the main character [played by Jennifer Lawrence, who is searching for her father] had a welcoming ally in her uncle, her journey would be less interesting. I wanted the audience to feel like anything could happen when she was with him\u2014that he might kill or molest her, that he was the least effective kind of ally she could have. I think that's what we got. I hope so.\n\nGQ: Has there ever been a villain you rooted for?\n\n John Hawkes: As a child, I cheered for was Frankenstein['s monster] because I related to him. Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day. Frankenstein isn't a classic villain particularly, but as a child you're frightened by that monster, and to find yourself hoping he will be okay, and having feelings of goodwill towards him, was an eye-opener. Later on, as a viewer\u2014even apart from my own participation in the show\u2014I found myself rooting for Ian McShane's Al Swearengen on Deadwood. The character is so dark, but Ian gave him so much humor and a sense of humanity that made him kind of irresistible. You never really see him screaming or yelling. Very rarely. It's a quiet, slow-burn menace. What David Milch did so wonderfully was to peel back the layers of Al. He was never a warm, cuddly guy, but he defined someone who we understand more as the series evolves. I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.\n\n GQ: When did you first realize that you could play a bad guy?\n\n John Hawkes: I moved to Austin, Texas after high school and was doing plays there. I'd always done comedy and light sorts of characters. Then I got cast in the Sam Shepard play Buried Child and the character that I played, Vince, had some darkness and some edge and freaked out a good bit and I connected with that. The audience seemed to connect with it as well. So that was another eye-opener.\n\nGQ: Do you find that costumes help you get into characters?\n\n John Hawkes: A lot of actors probably say this, but shoes feel important. They're the least photographed thing about you in a film, but shoes matter to me, as far as how a character moves. More specifically, Teardrop's Carhartt jacket in Winter's Bone mattered. It was someone's jacket on the property and [the filmmakers] asked if they could have it and they gave him a brand new jacket. It felt real and lived in and of the area. Then the make-up, scars, tattoos, the \"x\" by the eye\u2014all those things matter. I try not to pay a huge amount of attention to how I look, or become fixated on the look once it's set, but the first day of filming, sometimes you're playing somebody pretty rough and scary, and you go take a leak, and you look in the mirror and see yourself, and think, \"That's a rough-lookin' guy... \" For me, I don't always know that I have that in me, so it's great to become surprised in that way.\n\nGQ: I wonder if Patrick saw himself as a bad guy in Martha Marcy May Marlene?\n\n John Hawkes: I think, on some level, he's aware that he's a monster, but he can never let that show. He also fools himself a lot of the time into believing that what he's doing is for the greater good, and I think that's typical of a lot of controlling, disturbed people.\n\nGQ: Do villains have much in common with heroes?\n\n John Hawkes: Whether you are playing a hero or a villain, they're fighting to solve their problem, they're trying to accomplish some sort of goal, and hopefully fairly fiercely.\n\nGQ: What's the most villainous line one of your characters has uttered?\n\n John Hawkes: Probably something like, \"Die. fucking scumbag.\" But what's more interesting to me are the lines that, taken out of context, don't mean much, but do within the context of the story. For Patrick it would be cornering Marcy in the bathroom and saying to her, \"You're my favorite, I'm not going to lose you.\" It was chilling within the moment. For Teardrop, something that became kind of iconic on a small level was looking in the rearview mirror at the cop and saying to him, \"Is this going to be our time?\" My favorite line of Teardrop's was taken out of the script early, but in terms of playing him, it was hugely beneficial just to have it in my body. The line was, \"You got to be ready to die every day. Then you got a chance.\" It chilled me, and I thought it was strangely heroic.\n\nGQ: Was it hard to shake off Teardrop or Patrick once filming was done?\n\n John Hawkes: I'm not a method actor per se, but if you pretend intensely\u2014particularly if it's a dark circumstance\u2014it's hard for me not to have a piece of that in me. It's hard to shake that sometimes, I would say. Playing these characters, I've felt like they take a piece of you. You are aware that you're an actor shooting a scene, but these feelings and actions feel real on a kind of compartmentalized level, and that can be hard for me to shake. So I try to choose roles wisely.\n\nGQ: Have you ever been tempted to turn on the bad in real life?\n\n John Hawkes: It might be fun to be a real jerk sometime, but I was raised right on some level, and it's hard to. That's why I love playing villains, because I get to do things I might get locked up for in real life. It's like almost exorcising a demon in a fairly safe environment where no one hopefully gets hurt\u2014and we can all laugh and go have lunch afterwards.\n\nGQ: Is there a real-world villain that you would like to play?\n\n John Hawkes: I'm less interested in playing real-world villains. For some reason, the ones that are made-up are more interesting to me. That said, Charlize Theron in Monster is one of the great villainous performances I've seen, and it's based on an actual person, so maybe I should stop wussing out and play some real evil.\n\nGQ: How do you think screen villains have changed over the years?\n\n John Hawkes: You look at earlier screen villains, like James Cagney in Public Enemy\u2014a very interesting character, very compelling\u2014or Joseph Cotton in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt; that performance is just so amazing. But I feel like from the seventies onward, villains got more nuanced, and, in some ways, came to carry the film more. I think that has to do with loss of innocence ultimately. People have a lot less trust in their leaders, and for good reason, and that's trickled down into movies.\n\nGQ: How evil, percentage-wise, would you say you are in real life?\n\n John Hawkes: In real life, I'm not evil at all. But in thought? About fifty percent. Sorry, Mom.\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/john-hawkes-gq-june-2012-bad-guys-portfolio>