Interview: John Hawkes, actor

IF you’ve only started to notice John Hawkes recently, you might reckon he’s quite a creepy character. Last year he was Oscar-nominated for his performance as a crystal meth- addicted hillbilly in Winter’s Bone, and in his new film Martha Marcy May Marlene he’s the leader of a disturbing cult. To Hawkes, this is progress: “If I ever write a book about my career, it might be called I Can’t Find Love And I Always Die,” he says with a grin. “For a long time it seemed that my characters were loners, who didn’t often make it to the end of the film.” In Martha Marcy May Marlene he doesn’t die, but his idea of love is as terrifying as it is tender. Like any good cult leader, Patrick is a sinister parody of a father figure, who ensnares a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) with a combination of mindgames and menacing allure. “I really didn’t want to be part of a cult story, it felt like a subject that had been overdone,” says Hawkes, whose steady gaze, hollow cheeks and dark hair have led to offers to play Charles Manson; offers he has always turned down.

“What hooked me was that this is a very different viewpoint. It’s less about how she gets drawn in and more about her trying to escape. And Patrick isn’t some sort of devil incarnate, an obvious conman, so it makes her smarter, and more credible. It was Sean Durkin’s first film as a director but after reading his script and talking to him, I was eager to be part of it.”

Through flashbacks, the details of a small community controlled by bullying, and then something worse, are gradually revealed. Durkin based his screenplay on first-hand interviews with cult refugees, but it is Hawkes’ evil Messiah who provides the film with its title, renaming Martha as part of his brainwashing technique. “You look like a Marcy May,” he says to the runaway, in a line that ranks as one of the most unsettling chat-ups ever.

Later he picks at an old guitar and woos her with Marcy’s Song, an obscure tune by Jackson C Frank. It’s a remarkable scene invoking a chilling use of intimacy. Hawkes, who has a roots-rock band called King Straggler, played the folk tune himself, live on set.

“A studio would record the song beforehand, add sounds of birds and the outdoors and you’d just pretend to play the song and sing along, but Sean wasn’t interested in that,” he recalls. “We did three takes, and I think he chose the last, because you can kind of hear my fingers running out of steam as the song ends.”

Despite the intensity of his characters, Hawkes is a warm, slightly shy man with a nice deadpan sense of humour. Unlike many movie actors, he’s not interested in fanpages, Twitter or Facebook. In fact, he doesn’t have an e-mail address, “but I do have running water and electricity”. The lack of e-mail only tripped him up once, when he arrived on the set of Winter’s Bone to discover the script had flown between e-mail accounts and changed enormously. He had to campaign on set just before filming to restore some of the toughness to the terror-infused uncle who may, or may not, have his niece’s welfare at heart.

That battle paid off with a nomination for a best supporting actor Oscar. “That made my family proud,” he says. It also brought quite a few more scripts for bigger budget pictures. “To be honest, many of them weren’t a lot better roles than I was playing ten years ago in studio films. I wasn’t surprised by that, but I was disappointed,” he admits. The offers from independent films proved more tempting. “I lean more in that direction anyway, so out of the large stack I was sent after last year’s awards season, I think I chose the two lowest budget.” He grins helplessly, “I have a very understanding agent and manager.”

Hawkes’ choices are often provocative, but lately it seems that studios and audiences might be coming around to his way of thinking. In The Surrogate, Hawkes portrays a disabled writer who hires a sex therapist to help him lose his virginity at the age of 38. The film was launched at the Sundance Film Festival last year, received a standing ovation and sparked a distribution bidding war, with Fox Searchlight the eventual winner.

There’s another film in the bag – a role in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln – but Spielberg won’t allow his cast to discuss it before release. Hawkes also recently turned up in Steven Soderbergh’s viral drama Contagion, and in a break from his earlier tradition, managed to be one of the few Oscar nominees in the cast who didn’t end up in a body bag before the end credits. “When my agent told me that I’d been offered a movie with Soderbergh I just told him, ‘Whatever it is, just say yes – I would sweep floors to work with him.’ And my agent said, ‘Well that’s great, because he wants you for Roger the janitor.’”

Hawkes never attended drama school or acting classes, but he does recommend hitchhiking for budding actors. “That was my training. You might be with someone you’re really offended by but when it’s pouring with rain, you have to play a character that will convince them that you are just like them, at least until you can get out of the car and wash your mouth out with soap.”

He left Texas for Hollywood in his early thirties, looking for work. It took a year for him to land his first job – a part in the TV show Northern Exposure – but he has worked steadily ever since. Once you register his squirrely features, he seems to pop up all over the place. “I’ve done about 100 TV shows and movies,” he agrees, “I’ve been around.”

Some roles resonate more than others. When I mention that I’d spotted him in the 2000 film Perfect Storm as one of the fishermen on George Clooney’s doomed crew, he lights up at the memory. “George is a practical joker, he got us all, several times,” recalls Hawkes, but it turns out that the jokes were a way of letting off steam in an intense situation.

The movie is based on a real tragedy which occurred a decade earlier, and director Wolfgang Petersen elected to shoot scenes in the men’s hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts. “All the survivors were around, some were willing to lend their stories, some weren’t. I really understood those who didn’t want us there,” recalls Hawkes. “We filmed on a boat that looked exactly like the one they used, so when they saw us steaming into the harbour at the end of a long shooting day, I could see it was hard for them.”

Hawkes played Bugsy Moran, whose family had refused to co-operate with the book or the film, “so they just made Bugsy into a character. The real Bugsy wasn’t comic, and he wasn’t small and thin like me – he was actually one of the biggest, toughest guys in the fleet.”

Inevitably, while they were filming, Hawkes bumped into one of the real Bugsy’s brothers, who introduced him to Moran’s father, mother and other members of the family. He admits that they were wary of the actor and this alternative version of Bugsy, but Hawkes’ gentle empathy won them over.

“They were very kind to me. During the scenes out at sea, I never got sick and they would congratulate me on it – “You’ve got salt in your veins, kid, you’re one of us.” He smiles slightly: “It’s an emotional thing, even now.”

• Martha Marcy May Marlene is in selected cinemas from today.