The On-Set Robin Williams Surprise on the Dead Poets Society Set That Ethan Hawke Never Forgot
In a new career retrospective, Ethan Hawke recalls how Robin Williams’ off-the-cuff brilliance blindsided him on the Dead Poets Society set—and why the surprise still echoes through his career decades later.
Every now and then an actor drops a behind-the-scenes nugget that actually changes how you picture a classic. Ethan Hawke just did that, talking about Robin Williams on the Dead Poets Society set, and it is a little bit perfect.
The setup: Hawke looks back, and he lands on 'Dead Poets'
Hawke sat down for Vanity Fair's latest career retrospective video and walked through the hits. When he got to Dead Poets Society, he shared a memory from the room - literally four feet away - watching director Peter Weir and Robin Williams figure out how to build scenes.
Weir vs. Williams (in the best way)
Hawke says Weir had a tough job: he was guiding a bona fide comic genius while, in Hawke's words, dramatic acting was still new territory for Williams at that point. So what happened? Williams did not stick to the script. He jumped into improvisation without asking Weir for permission first. And instead of shutting it down, Weir let him run - as long as the scene still hit the beats the script was aiming for.
Watching that back-and-forth clicked something for Hawke. Two artists with very different approaches, not trying to become the same person, not clashing just to clash, and still meeting in the middle to make the moment work. He points to that as the power of collaboration - the whole group’s imagination making the movie bigger than any single point of view and able to hold multiple perspectives at once.
"That was a new door that was opened to my brain, that you could play like that."
The takeaway (and why it matters)
- Williams, later the Good Will Hunting star, improvised freely on Dead Poets Society and did not ask Weir ahead of time; Weir embraced it if the scene still accomplished the script’s goals.
- Hawke watched this up close - literally a few feet away as they talked performance - and it changed how he thought about acting.
- He stresses you do not have to be alike to work well together, and you do not have to be enemies if you are different. The point is the shared, collective imagination that makes a film larger than one person's perspective.
- For context: Dead Poets Society is one of Williams's signature movies. He was Oscar-nominated for Best Actor as John Keating. Hawke, who played Todd Anderson, broke wide with that role and later headlined films like Gattaca and Boyhood.