Ethan Hawke opens up about his sinister The Black Phone villain and discusses the film's horror elements in a brand new featurette. Director Scott Derrickson's first horror feature since 2014's Deliver Us from Evil centers on the plight of Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), who gets abducted by the Grabber (Hawke) and kept in a locked room with a broken black rotary phone on the wall. Delayed from its original February 2022 release date, the film is on track to release this summer, and The Black Phone early reactions have praised it as a scary, tense horror project.
Ahead of its June 24, 2022 release, Dolby shares a featurette with Hawke delving into the Grabber's evil nature and his thoughts about The Black Phone as a horror film. The video shows Hawke in a derelict warehouse discussing the film's elements between a few new, home video-style clips and older footage. He says the Grabber is not a good person, and is somebody whose soul is "so eroded that he can justify things that most of us don't even want to think about." Check out the featurette below:
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Interestingly, the actor also comments on his decision to play an antagonist, and says the time is right for him to take on the role. Hawke has played such parts infrequently, but along with his Moon Knight villain Arthur Harrow, the Grabber lets audiences see a darker side of the performer. Finally, Hawke's reference to The Black Phone as a sibling movie to Sinister, but going to a deeper, stranger place, could also confirm a theorized shared universe between the two Derrickson horror movies.
Source: Dolby
