Meet Mr Renaissance man

Ethan Hawke is the kind of bloke girls go crazy for, and men are sort of programmed not to. He might not have Johnny Depp's dangerous edge and unpredictable nature, nor Brad Pitt's groin-jolting body, but his craggily handsome features and deceptively quiet smartness fill any gaps.

He has presented at the Oscars, been (reportedly) pestered on the phone by Madonna and is married to the gorgeous Uma Thurman. His following is such that the name Ethan has been propelled to the top of the list of most popular names for boys since he first sprang to fame spouting 'Oh Captain, my Captain' in Dead Poets Society in 1989.

And he's never killed anyone on screen until now, as the goateed prince in Michael Almereyda's Generation X Hamlet co-starring Julia Stiles as Ophelia, Liev Schreiber, Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora and Sam Shepard as the Ghost.

'This is a really happening, modern-dress version,' he says. 'I'd actually been thinking of doing the same thing when Michael contacted me. We'd been friends for ages and our original intent was to do it low-budget, in 16mm, fast and cheap in New York.

We didn't want to make a "definitive" Hamlet, we wanted to make "our" Hamlet. There have been more than 40 films made of Hamlet, so the waterfront has been well and truly covered, but this one seems to bring the story to the here and now. [Their Hamlet is over in less than two hours.]

'The play has a very heavy sense of paranoia - everybody is watching everybody - and I find that very modern. There are certain things in life that have never changed, even though our environment has changed completely. I mean, hell, Hamlet is just a medieval graduate student given to moping around his parents' house. Here, home is a steel-and-glass Manhattan hotel, the Elsinore, and he is a film-maker who seems to spend a lot of time hanging around. His father was the president of the Denmark Corporation, a man from a world of laptops and limousines.

'I hope we don't all fall on our ass - doing the classics in modern gear is always a risk, but hey! Look at Julia Stiles's 10 Things I Hate About You, a loose version of The Taming Of The Shrew. That was a huge hit, and so was Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet with Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio.'

Slipping up would not be good news for Hawke, 30, who earlier this year was cited as a Renaissance Man For The Millennium. 'Oh, I think all that labelling stuff is crap,' he splutters. 'We are more than what we do. Corny as it sounds, we're human beings, for crying out loud. Take away that label! One of the benefits of not getting yourself labelled, if you can avoid it, is that it makes it less hard when you want to write a book or direct a play or do something else. Even if acting's the only thing I do remotely, remotely well, these other things inform and make me a better actor.'

We are in London to talk about Hamlet. Sprawled across a huge, gold-covered sofa at the Dorchester, even in a dark suit and white shirt he still seems too unformed, too uncool to be the man he's proved he is. (The fact that he's wearing a belt with a buckle made up of three horses' heads, which he tells me he's had since he was five years old, only compounds my theory.)

But while he has the apparent pureness of an am-dram Jesus with urgent blue eyes, he must also be quite an egomaniac workaholic to have a track-record like his: more than 20 films (including Before Sunrise, Snow Falling On Cedars and Great Expectations with Gwyneth Paltrow), a coming-of-age novel called The Hottest State, for which he got a huge advance ('for some reason I find it vulgar to talk about money,' he replied when I asked him which of the reported advances - $300,000, $400,000 or $500,000 - was accurate), and another one due out soon, plus his own theatre company, Malaparte, in New York.