Ethan Hawke is glad that it was Leonardo DiCaprio and not him cast as Jack Dawson, the leading man in James Cameron‘s 1997 epic Titanic.
“I don’t think I would have handled that success as well as Leo,” Hawke told British GQ in an interview published Monday. “He was a f—ing Beatle.”
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Leonardo DiCaprio, Josh Charles, and Ethan Hawke sit together at a New York Knicks game in 2004
Hawke, who by that time had already starred in Dead Poets Society, Reality Bites, and Before Sunrise, doesn’t think he was equipped to handle all the things that came along with the part in the romantic drama, costarring Kate Winslet, which was based on the real-life sinking of the same-named passenger ship in 1912.
Titanic went on to earn more than $2.2 billion worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, and it catapulted DiCaprio into starring roles in high-profile movies, including Catch Me If You Can, The Aviator, and Blood Diamond, the latter two for which he was nominated for an Oscar.
Instead, Hawke spent that era in movies such as Gattaca, in which he costarred with Uma Thurman, Great Expectations, and Hamlet. But he only found himself in the throes of the kind of fame that prevents you from living a normal life when he and Thurman began a relationship while making the sci-fi thriller.
“It’s humiliating,” Hawke said of being in the tabloids. “It’s almost humiliating even when they’re saying positive things.”
Hawke and Thurman married in 1998 and welcomed daughter Maya in July of that year and a son, Levon, in 2002. They divorced in 2005.
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But Hawke’s career has not suffered. He’s shown up regularly in hits, and his peers in the entertainment industry have recognized him for his work with, for instance, four Oscar nominations.
He also put a positive spin on not having won an Academy Award, which he picked up from being nominated for best supporting actor the 2001 crime drama Training Day.
He recalled that his costar, Denzel Washington, had whispered to him after he lost that night that it was better he had lost: “You don’t want an award to improve your status,” Hawke said on Max’s Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace. “You want to improve the award’s status.”
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