The Last Movie Stars, a new documentary series on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward released to HBO Max this past weekend, occasionally allows its focus to drift to a third subject. Ethan Hawke presides as director and producer on the six episodes, and he makes no effort to minimize his own presence under some pretense of fly-on-the-wall objectivity. As much as his extensive research project exists to chronicle the lives and works of a Hollywood power couple in a league of their own, he also digests the narrative at hand by examining his own relationship to it.
With a cavalcade of famous pals Zoom-ing in during the shaggy-haired early days of quarantine, a murderers’ row of actors’ actors who also record voiceover readings of archival documents, Hawke pontificates on how a generation of serious thespians modeled themselves and their careers after Newman and Woodward. For a substantive performer looking to cultivate a rich inner life of varied hobbies and intellectual pursuits to go along with A-list icon status, there’s no clearer exemplar than Newman, whose ice-blue eyes hid the soul of a Lee Strasberg student and racecar driver.
