
[The following story contains spoilers from the movie and novel Juliet, Naked.]
The romantic comedy Juliet, Naked is just the latest Nick Hornby book to be adapted for the big screen.
But this time, Ethan Hawke, a longtime fan of Hornby’s work, was finally able to play one of the music-loving author’s main characters.
“I really wanted to audition for About a Boy and they wouldn’t let me. I wanted that part really badly,” Hawke told The Hollywood Reporter at Juliet, Naked‘s New York premiere earlier this week. “And I really wanted to do High Fidelity and John Cusack did a great job, and this one came along and I got to play it so I’m happy.”
In the film, Hawke plays Tucker Crowe, a mysterious musician with whom Chris O’Dowd’s Duncan is obsessed, much to the annoyance of his long-suffering girlfriend Annie, played by Rose Byrne. After Annie bashes Juliet, Naked, Tucker’s newly surfaced demo, the musician himself gets in touch with her and the two begin a correspondence that leads to a relationship.
“Immediately they have a rapport and the fact that she writes a scathing review and he thinks it’s brilliant, it starts off in a very witty and unconventional place,” Byrne said.
It’s that connection that leads Annie to take a chance on Tucker, Byrne added.
“I think he’s a risk. There is a sort of danger about him but that’s part of the attraction,” the actress told THR on the red carpet at New York’s Metrograph theater. “That was a challenge when we were filming it: Why does she do that and why does she go to a guy who’s as dysfunctional as Duncan?”
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And when it came time to craft their characters for the film, Hawke and O’Dowd both said they based their portrayals on the parts as they were written in Hornby’s novel.
“The character was perfect as conceived, and I just had to try not to screw it up,” Hawke told THR.
Added O’Dowd, “I read the book actually before I read the script, and when you read the book first and there’s parts that you love and you worry about losing, I was really relieved when I read the script because I felt that they had captured all of the bits that I liked. I feel like we’re pretty true to it.”
But as with most book-to-big-screen adaptations, there were elements of the Juliet, Naked story from the novel that were changed or dropped for the film version.
“We were trying to do the best of in the novel,” producer Barry Mendel told THR. “The great moments in the novel are of course when these three people get together all in the same room, so you’re trying to build towards those and build up what would make those scenes scintillating. So we had to understand what Tucker Crowe means to [Duncan] and we had to understand what Tucker’s life is, like, 25 years from ever performing and we had to understand what Annie’s life is like being in a relationship that hasn’t worked out and being kind of angry about it. So we just had to build those elements so that when all three came together, it was combustible.”
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Director Jesse Peretz explained that they consolidated some aspects of the novel for the movie.
“I think it’s really going with your gut and if you have to let go of stuff, to start with, how can you compress a couple of characters into one? Annie’s sister Ros wasn’t actually that character in the book but she was an amalgamation of her best friend at the museum, who was a lesbian, and her mother and her terrible therapist. We sort of figured out how to … funnel them all through this one character,” he said. “I think it is really just trying to kill the darlings of the things you may love but just can’t fit in the story and just focus in on what’s the sort of A, B plot that you want to delve into.”
Another notable change is the ending of the movie, which is slightly different from the ambiguous finale of the book.
“I felt uncomfortable actualizing the ending of the book,” Peretz told THR. “Within the context of the book, it’s so vague and oblique, there’s something kind of exciting about how it really lets you imagine how they move forward, but for me I really felt, and especially telling the story in 2018, I felt that any ending that kind of implied that she was moving from one man child to another man child was gonna be something that was ultimately unsatisfying to most people that I cared about. Maybe to some people it would’ve worked. But we really worked to craft something that came out of the story that gives each of them a personal victory in terms of challenging places that they’re stuck in their life in which maybe there were motivating forces for them to make a change in their life, and then ultimately leave the hope for those that want to that maybe somehow after that there was room for them to find each other.”
After meeting his idol, Duncan becomes ironically less enamored with Tucker by the end of the film.
“There is something to be said for never meeting your heroes,” O’Dowd told THR. “Duncan is obsessed with Tucker, but more than that he is obsessed with the person he no longer is from the time that he loved him first. When you love something when you’re 16 that never leaves you, it becomes a touchstone for the rest of your life. Duncan is a fanatic rather than a fan — he hasn’t really moved on. So when Tucker releases a new album, it kind of clicks him out of that and somehow that nostalgia or thing that he was holding onto from better times past is kind of shattered for him.”
As for the effect Tucker ultimately has on Annie, Hawke said, “I think one of the most wonderful things about falling in love is feeling witnessed, feeling that someone else sees you. Most of us don’t feel seen. I think he sees her, and I think that’s enough.”
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