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"Each one of those magazines needs more fodder," Hawke says, reflecting on the dozens of publications that deal in Hollywood celebrities, feeding the voracious public appetite. "And I do it too. Reading idle gossip is much more easy than reading Moby Dick, you know what I mean? Unless it's about you and then you want everybody to put it down, grow up."
He has been fodder in recent months as his six-year marriage to bombshell Uma Thurman disintegrated amid rumours of his infidelity and reported threats from her brothers to exact physical revenge.
It was an ugly saga, although, to her credit, Thurman never trashed her future ex in public.
"I can face anything," she told The Toronto Sun recently. "I always believe that the facts are friendly, that the truth is your friend. You just don't need to discuss things and I don't, really."
Neither does Hawke, who is keeping his movie career alive by co-starring with Angelina Jolie in the serial-killer thriller Taking Lives, which opens across North America tomorrow.
"You know, I've worked very hard to try not to care," Hawke says of the gossip mongering. "But I can't control it. I've got to move on with my life. The quicker I move on, the quicker someone else can move on."
Hawke, just like Ben Affleck and his forthcoming Jersey Girl, is fretting about the residual effect of being in the gossip columns and then on the screen.
Will audiences be distracted? "What can I do about it?" says Hawke. "I worry about it. I worry more about it on a personal level. You hate having people you love reading about you and everybody looking at you when they meet you, thinking weird things in their head.
"(But) I've been dedicated to the work my whole life and hopefully that will bring itself back around.
"If the work is good, ultimately what is going on in someone's personal life ends up not being that substantial. It's something that you crane your neck around (to see) when you drive by a car wreck."
The work in Taking Lives is mainstream. After co-starring with Oscar-winner Denzel Washington in the cop picture Training Day -- with an excellent, subtle performance that earned the 33-year-old Hawke an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor -- he decided to try another genre picture and see what he could do with a thriller, with its formula plot.
"I thought this part was a really good opportunity for me to do something I had never done before and it was really interesting for me. How the formula works and whether you are turned on by that formula is another question altogether."
Hawke, who careens between Hollywood mainstream and off-beat indie movies, says he has "to keep the ball rolling" by doing the big box-office hits.
"I feel that I do, you know. Because, quite frankly, if you don't, it gets harder to get anything done at all.
"It's just trying to find a healthy balance. It's interesting. I keep shaking it up for myself."
SUN RISES ON HIS CULT FLICK
Don't call Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke's latest collaboration with filmmaker Richard Linklater, a true sequel to their cult favourite Before Sunrise.
"It's hardly really a sequel," Hawke says, discounting that he and French starlet Julie Delpy play the same characters. "That was such a weird little arthouse movie," he says of the 1995 original. "So it's not like doing Bad Boys 2 or something like that."
Before Sunrise helped establish Hawke as an indie star. "That movie's really close to all our hearts," Hawke says of the quirky romance about an American in France. "It's had its own little cult following and we really, for the past nine years, thought about how much fun it would be to try to revisit those people and that situation and see what we might have to say about relationships at this juncture in our lives."
Linklater (The School Of Rock) is a friend and collaborator, Hawke says.
"I feel that he's truly one of the unique voices in American cinema. He is just his own guy and I love him because we live in a community where everyone's trying to get as much jack as quick as they can and this guy's real sincere."