Raymond & Ray: Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor explore the scars of a ‘terrible father’

Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor are teaming up to host the film Raymond & Ray on AppleTV+ (premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival) from writer-director Rodrigo García, who plays half-brothers who find themselves at the funeral of their horrific father.

As the film begins, we see Raymond (McGregor) appear at his brother Ray’s (Hawke) house to tell him their father is dead and the funeral will be the next day. Ray’s instinct is to stress to his brother that he doesn’t have to go, but Raymond convinces his brother to go to the funeral with him.

“I want to know what putting him underground looks like, how it feels, but I’m afraid it’s going to kick my ass,” Raymond tells Ray. “Come with me.”

Raymond is a rather soft-spoken businessman who has been divorced twice, while Ray is a charismatic drug addict and musician. They both share a deep hatred and anger they have for their father, who was impossible to please and “didn’t have a humble bone in his body,” which ultimately left lifelong scars on the half-siblings.

“I think it’s more complicated than just forgiving the father. It’s forgiving yourself for giving in to your anger and self-loathing and how you accept yourself in the moment,” Hawke told reporters.

“Ray tells Raymond throughout the movie, ‘Why can’t you just hate him, why can’t you be mad at him?’ And in the end… he can express and accept his anger towards his father,” adds McGregor. “I don’t think it’s forgiveness in his case. It’s an acceptance of the truth that it’s okay to feel that way about this man who was a terrible father to him.”

“It is very easy for us to criticize masculinity”

Filmmaker Rodrigo García is best known for creating films with female-centric stories, but also for Raymond & Rayhe immersed himself in the special dynamics of a male relationship.

The story goes on

“I think that denial of emotion, which can happen to anyone, is maybe more common in men and maybe straight men…these are gross generalities, but that’s how I leaned into the story,” says García.

“It’s very easy for us to criticize masculinity or exaggerate its positive sides, but not having a positive role model as a father paralyzes you, and I think so many men deal with that in different ways. says Hawke of exploring a story that specifically touches on masculinity.

“We’ve been shown all the wrong ways for anger to manifest. We’ve been told it’s wrong to hold it in, we’ve been told it’s wrong to act it out, so in a way the film is a meditation for me on how anger can manifest properly, because if you don’t let it go , it’s a constant disruption in your life and if you let it go the wrong way you trip over it and it’s really complicated for a lot of people.”

An important aspect of Ray’s story is his connection to music and how there is still a wound from his father’s lack of acceptance and appreciation of his passion.

“They express their hatred, disappointment or heartbreak for how their father treated them when they were kids, and they resolve it and release it in different ways,” says McGregor. “I love that Ray’s musical journey and that he can express it.

“I think the fact that the father destroyed Ray’s faith in his music, which is his creative expression. We can see that he’s very talented, but he can’t express it because his father has hurt him over the years. and the fact that he can express himself through music at the end of the film is just such a beautiful idea, which Rodrigo wrote beautifully.”

When asked if he could empathize with these characters as an actor, Hawke explained that they use their personal “knowledge of the universe.”

“I think one of the things that drew us both to this project is how good it was on the side to imagine getting the same name as your brother because your dad was afraid of confusing you, and to knowing that both are our mothers who we both adore was badly hurt by our father,” says Hawke. “It’s hard to forgive your father for hurting your mother, it’s really difficult and both men are in it caught.”

“What you first perceive as bad can later be good”

While the actors praised the complexity and three-dimensionality in which their characters are written, a key aspect of the story’s ebb and flow is that both Raymond and Ray recognize that there are people in the world who are completely different from their father saw.

“I always found it moving, my last line about us not really knowing him and this awareness that we have these ideas of who our parents are, how we perceive them, but one of those things that men keep coming back to.” caught that they only saw one aspect of that person,” says Hawke. “There are other people who have had other positive relationships.

“I remember my mother feeling the same way at my own grandfather’s funeral. She sat and watched everyone give these speeches and started to see different cuts of a person and a life and what that person was as a professional, what they were as a lover, what they were as a person and as a parent were. And so the movie seems really clever to me at times, what you see as bad at first could be good later on.

Two of the characters that Raymond and Ray encounter who had a different view of their father are Kiera (Sophie Okonedo), her father’s former nurse who is able to see through Ray’s more problematic traits, and Lucia (Maribel Verdú) , the feisty and feisty wife of her father’s eccentric last lover, who becomes particularly close to Raymond.

“To Kiera, she’s a nurse, so I think she likes to listen to people and hear their stories. That’s probably one of their qualities, and not everyone is like that,” says Okonedo. “I get the impression that the tiny bits of story that are in the script about Kiera obviously have some dysfunctions in her family, like everyone else, and I got a feeling that maybe she was of an age where she would have the sort of decided things in life for herself and didn’t want to…she seems pretty sure of herself and pretty comfortable in her own skin.”

“I think the most interesting thing about this film is basically the relationship between these two brothers, these two wounded souls and I think my role has nothing to do with them, so Lucia is a free soul and suddenly she’s walking over them Gone, but nothing has changed in her life,” adds Verdú.

While it would be easy for a story like this to focus entirely on the drama, there’s a comedic atmosphere, particularly in the brotherly banter between Hawke and McGregor, which lends the story some much-needed lightness.

“You had to put the craziness, the craziness into it. I saw it less as humor and more as a kind of folly, eccentric behavior. But of course, once you really work with it and direct it, it becomes fun,” said Rodrigo García. “Ethan and Ewan brought a lot of humor, I think they immediately associated with brothers bullying each other and provoking each other and telling each other the truth and calling each other about their bullshit.

“They just had a great on-screen relationship, which was funny. I think the only thing that people found amusing was that they mourn each other. … I think I was focusing on the weirdness, but they made it even funnier, and I think that’s necessary telling tragic stories.”