Ethan Hawke might be a four-time Academy Award nominee with a string of critically acclaimed performances under his belt dating back decades, but he’s also shown that he’s rather partial to some B-tier genre fare when the occasion calls for it.
The 50 year-old loves to work, as evidenced by the fact he’s appeared in no less than 33 movies and four TV shows in the last ten years alone, while he’s got an exciting upcoming schedule that includes the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Moon Knight, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, Robert Eggers’ The Northman and Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone.
Hawke reunites with his Sinister director in the Blumhouse horror, which marks his ninth collaboration with the hit factory, and this could be the scariest one yet. Based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill, the plot follows a child locked in a basement with an antique telephone, that rings at night with calls from the dead.
The first footage from The Black Phone recently screened at CinemaCon, and it’s said to be powerful stuff. Hawke plays a sadistic murderer who locks children in his soundproof basement where he tortures and kills them, with the titular telephone haunted by his past victims, trying to ensure the same fate doesn’t befall Mason Thames’ Finney Shaw.
The trailer showed the youngster being lured in by Hawke’s part-time magician, revealing him to be trapped in the basement before the supernatural trappings kick in. The Black Phone is scheduled for release on January 28th, 2022, so it could be a while yet before the promo gets made available to the public.
