The Black Phone marks another winning collaboration for Ethan Hawke, Scott Derrickson, and C. Robert Cargill following 2012’s Sinister.
Whereas Hawke plays a character trying to save his family from a malevolent entity in Sinister, The Black Phone challenges him to tap into the darker side of a horrific scenario by playing the villain. Hawke is The Grabber in The Black Phone, a man kidnapping children in a small town in Denver in the 1970s. However, The Grabber may have met his match in his latest target, Finney played by Mason Thames. Initially, the situation seems hopeless with Finney trapped in a soundproof basement, but then he realizes he has the ability to communicate with The Grabber’s past victims using a disconnected phone on the wall.
I love detailed world-building and backstory. I have what often feels like an insatiable appetite for information on what causes someone like The Grabber to turn into this type of person, the ins and outs of his ritual, how this mysterious phone works, and then some. However, one of the most impressive qualities of The Black Phone is that it doesn’t give you that information, and it doesn’t need to. It never feels as though Derrickson is withholding, rather that he’s giving just enough to preserve the mystery and up the scare factor, while also never letting you forget that this is Finney’s story, not The Grabber's.
But of course, when you’re the person playing The Grabber you might need some of those unseen and unheard details to fully access the character’s headspace. During my recent chat with Hawke in celebration of The Black Phone’s June 24th release, I asked him if there’s any information or qualities of the character that we don’t necessarily hear or see on screen, but we can feel informing his work. Here’s what he said:
“I tried to. You try to give yourself a backstory, but like you, one of the things I really liked about the script is it doesn’t have a ton of exposition. The guy is clearly broken, malevolent and terrible, and when you’re doing things like hurting children, I don’t really care about the reason. I, the actor, need to know a reason. What makes him laugh? Why does he do X and not Y? What is it that makes him violent vs. kind, and what does he think is kind? I have to think about what that phone means to me and how this whole thing started, but what I like about the movie is that it doesn’t tell you what they are. You're experiencing it the way Mason experiences it, which is, he doesn’t know. And even the mask itself, you can’t even see what this guy looks like, so you’re hunting for any piece of information that you can find.”
Turns out, those masks, designed by special effects make-up legend Tom Savini, were key to helping Hawke figure out how to play The Grabber. Here’s how he put it:
“Based on my previous experience with Scott on Sinister, I gave him a tremendous amount of trust. I know how obsessive he is and how much smarter he is about this world and this environment than I am. So I didn’t really know and I asked a lot of questions about the mask, and I was confused by the answers, and it wasn’t until I saw them that I knew how to play the part. I found it absolutely fascinating that there were like eight different versions of the mask and we could pick different ones for different scenes. Scott had a logic to it all that was the logic of a mad person. There wasn’t necessarily an exact rhyme or reason, it was just his own broken mechanism trying to communicate in his own broken way. And the mask made him real for me in some strange way. It was like he’s ashamed of himself and that shame is driving him to even more unimaginable crimes. And that duality was confusing in a good way. It had a human logic to it, which is like, ‘Uh, it doesn’t make any sense at all.’”
Looking for more from Hawke on his experience making The Black Phone including takeaways from his collaboration with breakout star Mason Thames? You can find just that in our full conversation in the video interview at the top of this article!