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In real life, Ethan Hawke doesn’t go around getting his butt kicked.
But viewers of “The Lowdown” have watched his character, Lee Raybon, take repeated punches in the name of uncovering the truth. Now back for a second season on FX, Hawke is once again getting his (literal) kicks playing Raybon, the used bookseller and “truth-storian” at the center of the show, a noir drama with comedic elements set in the secret backrooms of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In a chat with The Post, Hawke compared making the show with creator Sterlin Harjo to “jumping off a cliff together.” When he signed on, there was just one episode with a full script. “It was a bet about what themes we wanted to talk about, and the tone of the show, and what we both wanted Lee to be like.”
The five-time Oscar nominee — who became famous for 1990s hits like “Dead Poets Society” and “Reality Bites,” but kept returning to indie theater and smaller, stranger projects — told The Post that after working with Harjo on his critically acclaimed TV show, “Reservation Dogs,” he was hooked on a future collaboration.
“We kind of auditioned each other,” he explained. “Afterwards, we felt really strongly that we needed to work together again.”
That “need” became Season 1 of “The Lowdown,” where Hawke spun Lee Raybon into a fascinating, but bumbling hero with a nose for corruption — and a motormouth that often worked overtime to undo the trouble he’d talked himself into.
The main plot had Lee poking into the supposed suicide of a gubernatorial candidate’s brother and uncovering the murky real estate dealings of some shifty businessmen. He pulled at threads and found both stories were woven together with plenty of danger attached.
Reviews of “The Lowdown” were overwhelmingly great — the show currently boasts a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and Harjo and Hawke brainstormed Season 2 while on the initial show’s press tour.
“Ethan and I talked about how accomplishing something and then getting recognition changes your life and can actually send people into a tailspin,” Harjo said, noting that he drew on his own feelings after “Reservation Dogs” became a critical darling.
Early in the season premiere, Lee gives an embarrassing, drunken, drug-fueled acceptance speech for a journalism award. “I think that all of your traumas come up in those instances,” Harjo admitted.
In Season 2, Lee is also dealing with the sudden arrival of his ne’er-do-well father, Lee Sr. (Tommy Lee Jones), who makes it clear where Hawke’s character inherited his nose for chaos. Hawke plays Lee like an exposed nerve this season, especially as his father’s arrival brings old pain to the surface.
The actor told The Post that throughout Season 1, he wondered “why Lee doesn’t want to grow up and why can’t he handle success.” But, he said, “One look at Tommy Lee Jones’ face and you see it.”
Harjo added that Lee recognizes himself in his father’s behavior. “It’s the version of himself that he doesn’t want to be.”
New additions to “The Lowdown” also have Hawke confronting his past in a more personal way:
Season 2 also gives a bigger role to Keith David, who first appeared with Hawke in “Reality Bites” in 1994, played private investigator Marty Brunner in Season 1; he tells The Post that he took the role in part because playing a TV detective was on his bucket list. In the new season Marty has now become a journalist and is digging into an archaeology smuggling ring. — and admitted that he took the role, in part, because playing a TV detective was on his bucket list.
“You gotta love Sterlin, because you think he’s going one way with a story and then all of a sudden, we take a sharp left turn and a different world opens up,” said David. “It certainly keeps you in the moment.”
Hawke’s longtime friend Martha Plimpton also makes an appearance as a menacing small-town sheriff with outsized personal style, including “a lot of gold jewelry and a duck’s ass hairdo.”
“Ethan’s one of my oldest, dearest friends,” she told The Post. “If he says, ‘Do you want to do something with me?’ it’s an automatic yes.” In this case, it was more like a sí, as Plimpton commuted all the way from Madrid, where she was shooting “Murderbot,” to make the show.
There is also the addition of Betty Gilpin as Ginger, a lawyer imperiled by her connection to a Native man who has mysteriously vanished from an Oklahoma prison. Her character brings out the best and worst in Hawke’s Lee, who smells both a grave injustice and a good story — and also can’t resist a pretty face.
And there are standalone episodes that function almost as one-act plays (or as Hawke puts it, a John Cassavetes short film). “The great noirs always have these little digressions into little pools, where you just feel the reality of the universe that’s surrounding the protagonist,” he explained.
“I will push things as far as I can and go wild with a side story,” Harjo added. “I want to be able to break off and go into the seedy underbelly of wherever we’re at.”
The goal, said Hawke, is to remove any trace of a soap opera from the show.
“It feels like these people are your friends and it’s confusing and messy, the way real life is,” he said. “That’s what drew me down to Tulsa for this show.”
Season 2 of “The Lowdown” debuts on Wednesday, October 14 on FX.
