Ethan Hawke Would Return For The Black Phone 2 Under One Condition

On June 24, Ethan Hawke and director Scott Derrickson's new supernatural thriller "The Black Phone" will begin offering up scares to moviegoers. This marks the second time that the Hollywood duo has worked together on a Blumhouse horror flick: 2013's "Sinister" was their first collaboration, and "The Black Phone" could very well be their last ... but not if Hawke has anything to say about it. Speaking in a recent interview, the "Moon Knight" villain explained that he was interested in appearing in a "Black Phone" sequel, but only under one major condition. 

For those who don't know, Hawke's "Grabber" character in "The Black Phone," with his terrifying mask, is a serial killer living outside of Denver in the year 1978. He abducts teenage boys and holds them captive for several days before eventually murdering them. One of his intended targets, Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), gets captured and begins communicating with The Grabber's previous victims using a disconnected phone in his basement. They attempt to give him clues about how to escape, while Finney's sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) uses psychic dreams to also help find him. The film has been getting positive reviews, with critics saying that Hawke and his young co-stars all shine. But no matter how successful "The Black Phone" is with reviewers or even at the box-office, Hawke insists that he'd only come back for a sequel if this one major thing happened.

According to Ethan Hawke, the only way he'd be interested in returning for "The Black Phone 2" or any sort of Blumhouse sequel would be if Scott Derrickson was also invited back to continue telling the story. 

"If Scott was involved, yeah," Hawke told Comicbook.com in an interview published on June 20. He added, "Sometimes sequels feel borne out of a storyteller's necessity to continue talking to you. And sometimes they feel borne out of a desire to make money off of the same poster again," Hawke said. "So I want to be the first. There's a difference." 

Throughout his entire career, Hawke had never once played a major villain until 2022 (via Variety). His Arthur Harrow and Grabber characters from "Moon Knight" and "The Black Phone" are the first official projects where Hawke has gotten to sink his teeth into something completely different and more menacing. Describing what his mindset has been like, the four-time Oscar nominee told Nerd Reactor that he was enjoying the plunge into the dark side, though also made a point to differentiate between his more sympathetic and logical Marvel character and the outright monster that The Grabber is. Hawke went on to joke that his foray into the malevolent side of things could just be a part of getting old. "Maybe it's turning 50, and the world wants me to be bad guys," he said. "I don't know. Maybe it's just I got tired of being the good guys. The life of an actor is funny. As you change, you start to get cast in different roles."