Ethan Hawke: Greedy Hollywood Power Players Will Lose Soon

Ethan Hawke refuses to hold back regarding the powerful forces he believes control the entertainment industry today. In a fresh interview with GQ, the Oscar-nominated actor lashed out at wealthy power players. He called them greedy bastards who think they command every aspect of Hollywood. Hawke predicts a major rebellion against this system will happen soon.

I believe in rebellion, according to him. He thinks people are going to wake up and punch back. Massive movements in music and live theater are coming. People are getting together right now, he said. Do not worry about the money or those greedy bastards, he added. They think they control everybody but they always lose in the end. Eventually, they will go into the grave. Hawke claimed their lives are worthless even if they think they are winning.

Hawke also expressed frustration with financial pressures shaping Hollywood right now. Projects actors care about most often come with the smallest paychecks. There is a direct correlation between passion and income, he stated. The more you love a project the less you get paid. If you want to beat the algorithm it is very difficult to do that and be paid well at the same time.

This isn't the first time Hawke has spoken about pitfalls in Hollywood last year. He called celebrity a poison for a young actor's brain during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. He got candid about his start as a young man there. Becoming famous at a young age affects psychology deeply. To be a professional actor that early is dangerous and extremely insidious. These effects are very hard to perceive when they happen.

Rogan compared the experience of becoming famous as a child to concrete. If concrete is made incorrectly with wrong water or cement it fails. Once it dries there is no way to repair or fix it. That analogy works for all walks of life, Rogan explained. If something traumatic happens in childhood recovery is very hard. It requires a tremendous amount of work to recover from such damage. Hawke agreed that celebrity acts like a tiny drop of mercury or poison for the brain.

During his GQ interview Hawke expressed the same sentiment about fame being an illness. You can handle little bits of it but too much causes problems, he said. Look at Elvis and Michael Jackson as examples. Celebrity is a form of isolation similar to putting animals in a zoo. Zoo animals go nuts so do human beings when isolated like that. It seems like nice isolation because people give money and tell you wonderful things. But nobody is being real with you which makes people insane. They start scratching trying to find some real life inside themselves.

And sometimes people cope with that pressure by turning to drugs, or acting out in fights, or whatever other ways exist for dealing with it. Last year, fellow actress Dakota Johnson joined the conversation by tearing into Hollywood, labeling the industry an absolute "mess." During her appearance on the show Hot Ones, she was asked why the sector has become so risk-averse. "I think it's hard when creative decisions are made by a committee," Johnson told host Sean Evans. She added that it is difficult when those choices come from people who don't even really watch movies or know anything about them, noting that this problem occurs frequently. Johnson grew up inside the business as the daughter of actors Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, so she knows the inner workings well. Her comments arrive as studios continue to churn out sequels and remakes while original storytelling often gets pushed aside. "When something does well... studios want to keep that going so they remake the same things," she claimed. But humans do not want that. They want fresh stories. They want to feel new things, experience new things, and see new things. She added, "So I don't know, I guess it's all just a bit of a mess right now, isn't it?" Fox News Digital's Sarah Sotoodeh and Stephanie Giang-Paunon contributed to this report.