Ethan Hawke and Ewan McGregor team up to anchor the film Raymond and Ray on AppleTV+ (Toronto International Film Festival premiere) from writer-director Rodrigo García, playing half-brothers who reconnect for the funeral of their terrible father.
At the start of the film, we see Raymond (McGregor) appear at his brother’s house, Ray (Hawke), to tell him that their father is dead and that the funeral is taking place the next day. Ray’s instinct is to point out 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 it’s like to put it underground, what it feels like, but I’m afraid it’ll kick my—” Raymond tells Ray. “Come with me.”
Raymond is a milder-mannered businessman who has been divorced twice, while Ray is a recovering drug addict and charismatic musician. They both connect over the deep hatred and anger they have towards their father, who was impossible to please and “didn’t have a humble bone in his body”, which ultimately created lifelong scars for him. half-siblings.
“It’s more complicated, I think, than just forgiving the father. It’s forgiving yourself for giving in to anger and self-loathing, and how to accept yourself in the moment,” Hawke told reporters. .
“Ray says to Raymond throughout the film, ‘Why can’t you afford to hate him, why can’t you be mad at him?’ And in the end, … he’s able to express and accept his anger at his father,” McGregor adds. “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 horrible father to him.”
![Ewan McGregor (left) and Ethan Hawke in](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Raymond-Ray-Ethan-Hawke-and-Ewan-McGregor-explore-the.jpeg)
“It’s very easy for us to criticize masculinity”
Filmmaker Rodrigo García is best known for creating films with female-centric stories, but for Raymond and Rayit delves into the particular dynamics of a male relationship.
“I think denial of emotion, which can happen to anyone, is maybe more common in men and maybe in heterosexual men, … those are rough generalities, but that’s the way it is. that I leaned into the story,” says García.
“It’s very easy for us to criticize masculinity or be hyperbolic about its positive aspects, but when you don’t have a positive role model as a father, it cripples you, and I think so many men deal with that in different ways,” Hawke says of exploring a story that specifically touches on masculinity.
“We’re told all the wrong ways for anger to come out. We’ve been told it’s wrong to repress it, we’ve been told it’s wrong to act on it, and so, to a certain way, for me, the movie is a meditation on what is the right way for anger to come out because if you don’t release it, it’s a constant stop in your life, and if you release it in the wrong feel, 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 hurt due to his father’s lack of acceptance and appreciation of his passion.
“They kind of express their hatred, or their disappointment, or their grief at how their father treated them when they were kids in different ways, and they unlock it and release it in different ways,” McGregor says. “I think it’s so beautiful, Ray’s musical journey and he’s able to express it.
“I think the fact that the father destroyed Ray’s confidence in his music, which is his creative expression. You can see that he is very talented, but he is unable to express it because of the damage that his father has caused him over the years, and the fact that at the end of the film he is able to express himself through music is such a beautiful idea that Rodrigo wrote beautifully.”
Asked about his ability, as an actor, to put himself in these characters, Hawke identified that they used their “personal knowledge of the universe”.
“I think one of the things that drew both of us to this project was how imagined it was on the page, imagining him being given the same name as your brother because your dad was worried about confusing you. , and to know that both of our mothers, whom we both adore, were seriously hurt by our father,” Hawke said. “It’s hard to forgive your dad for hurting your mom, it’s really hard and both men are trapped in this.”
![Maribel Verdú (left) and Sophie Okonedo in](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/1666500241_84_Raymond-Ray-Ethan-Hawke-and-Ewan-McGregor-explore-the.jpeg)
“What you perceive as bad at the beginning could be good later”
While the actors have praised the complexity and three-dimensionality in which their characters are written, a central aspect of the story’s ebb and flow has to do with Raymond and Ray realizing that there are people in the world. who saw their father completely differently.
“I always found it moving, my last line about, we didn’t really know him, and this realization that we have these ideas about who our parents are, how we perceive them, but one of the things that men keep getting hit is that they’ve only seen one side of that person,” Hawke says. “There are other people who have had different positive relationships.
“I remember at my own grandfather’s funeral, my mother felt much the same way. She was sitting there watching everyone give these speeches and started seeing different cuts of a person and d life, and what that person was as a professional, what they were as a lover, what they were as a human being and as a parent. And so the movie sometimes feels like very wise about what you perceive as bad in the beginning that might be good later.
Two of the characters Raymond and Ray encounter who had a different view of their father are Kiera (Sophie Okonedo), their father’s former nurse who is able to see through Ray’s more problematic traits, and Lucia (Maribel Verdú ), the dynamic and eccentric final lover who becomes particularly close to Raymond.
“For Kiera, she’s a nurse, so I think she enjoys listening to people and hearing their stories. That’s probably one of her qualities, and not everyone is like that,” Okonedo says. . “I feel like from the tiny bits of story that are in Kiera’s script that she obviously, like everyone else, has dysfunctions in her family, and I felt that she was maybe at an age where she was sort of deciding the things she wants and didn’t want in life, … she seems pretty confident and pretty comfortable in her own skin.”
“I think the most interesting thing about this movie 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 meets them, but nothing has changed in his life,” adds Verdú.
![Ewan McGregor (left) and Ethan Hawke in](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/1666500241_973_Raymond-Ray-Ethan-Hawke-and-Ewan-McGregor-explore-the.jpeg)
While it’s easy for a story like this to fall completely into drama, there’s a comic air to the brotherly banter between Hawke and McGregor, in particular, that adds some much-needed levity to the story.
“You had to introduce the madness, the craziness of this one. I didn’t think of it so much as humor but as some kind of madness, eccentric behavior. But of course once you really work with it and directing, it gets funny,” Rodrigo García said. “Ethan and Ewan brought a lot of humor, I think they immediately connected to this way the brothers give each other bullshit and kind of provoke each other, tell the truth and call each other out for their bullshit.
“They just had a great on-screen relationship that was funny. I think they gave each other heartbreak that people found funny. … I think I focused on being crazy, but they made it even more so. funny and I think it’s necessary to tell tragic stories.”
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