Ethan Hawke is discussing his breakup with Uma Thurman.
The “Training Day” actor, 54, who rarely shares insight into their seven-year marriage, opened up about the aftermath of their split in a new interview with GQ Hype published on Monday.
The famous exes married in 1998 and finalized their divorce in 2005.
Hawke and Thurman, 55, share two adult children: daughter Maya, 27, and son Levon, 23.
Now, 20 years after their relationship ended, the star recalled the embarrassment of going through their public split.
“It’s humiliating. It’s almost humiliating even when they’re saying positive things,” Hawke said, surrounding the coverage about their 2004 breakup.
While the pair met in 1997 during filming Andrew Niccol’s sci-fi flick “Gattaca,” the actor doesn’t necessarily suggest falling for co-stars on set.
“There’s a certain intimacy to the work that we do. Imaginative intimacy,” he explained to the outlet as he compared the situation to a game of Spin the Bottle.
Hawke admitted: “It’s such a high,” noting it “feels dangerous and thrilling.”
“It turns the temperature up in your life. It can be like falling in love at summer camp. It doesn’t have any connection to the dailiness of real life. That’s the danger of it,” he added.
Hawke and Thurman tied the knot on May 1, 1998.
The “Kill Bill” actress filed for divorce from Hawke in 2004 following rumors he had an affair with their nanny, Ryan Shawhughes.
He denied the cheating speculation but began publicly dating Shawhughes after his marriage exploded. Hawke married her in 2008, and they are the parents of two daughters: Clementine, 17, and Indiana, 14.
Hawke rarely speaks out about his relationship with Thurman, but he admitted that he was “depressed” after their breakup.
In 2018, the actor shared that their marriage began to fall apart after he earned an Oscar nomination for 2001’s “Training Day.”
“In a lot of ways, it could have been the beginning of something. It was the best moment of my career,” he told GQ of his nomination at the time. “Like, ‘Maybe, maybe you could be commercially viable.’ But I got divorced and my personal life fell apart.”
“I don’t know if you feel this way, but when you’re depressed, it’s really easy to see everything that is fake about other people and life, and I just started seeing that,” Hawke continued. “How phony celebrity was, how phony everything is. You channel your inner Holden Caulfield, you know?”
For Thurman’s part, she kept it professional when discussing their split.
“I cannot participate in anything critical about my children’s father,” she told Parade magazine in 2006, per People.
“I just need to keep peace,” Thurman explained. “I think it’s fair to say that I haven’t said one mean thing, and I’m not going to start now. It’s terrible for my family.”
The “Pulp Fiction” star later married Gary Oldman in 1990, but they were divorced by 1992.
Thurman welcomed her third child, daughter Luna, 13, with French hedge fund manager Arpad Busson. The pair were engaged in 2008, split in 2009, before reconciling and ending their relationship for good in 2014.
