Today’s Gatecrasher column in the Daily News takes us on a rare tread through the sometimes terribly awkward world of celebrity reporting. It seems that a stringer for the column, ably helmed of late by Frank DiGiacomo, was seated at a poker table with actor Ethan Hawke at a benefit for LABrynth Theater Company. The reporter asked whether things were “going well” with Hawke’s new-ish wife, former nanny Ryan Shawhughes. This set the Before Sunset star off, and he began to needle the reporter across the poker table. Finally, in retaliation, the reporter snapped back: “At least I didn’t ask the question that everyone is thinking!”
“What question is that?” Hawke asked, perilously. The reporter said that everyone wanted to know whether he was just a cheap Jude Law knockoff, shacking up with the nanny while he had a beautiful woman (in Hawke’s case, Uma Thurman, and in Law’s case, Sienna Miller) already on his arm. Naturally, at this moment, publicists went to kick out the reporter.
But Hawke relented and told them the poor gossip could stay. “I wasn’t prepared for [this event] to be a public thing,” he said, adding: “I don’t know what the Jude Law comment was; I assume it was derogatory. But I’ll tell you this: I liken my situation to The Sound of Music, not to Jude Law.”
Aw, see? Perhaps he had a wicked childhood. Perhaps he had a miserable youth — but somewhere in Ethan Hawke’s wicked, miserable past, he must have had a moment of truth!
Ethan Hawke gets nasty after his marriage to ex-nanny is compared to Jude Law’s affair [NYDN]
