The actor joins Jeremy Davies, Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw in the Blumhouse production.
Having previously played the haunted true-crime writer in Scott Derrickson’s SINISTER, Ethan Hawke has now taken a role in Derrickson’s THE BLACK PHONE, which the director wrote with C. Robert Cargill based on Joe Hill’s short story. The movie is set to roll in North Carolina next month for Universal release; Derrickson, Cargill and Jason Blum are producing, with Hill as an executive producer. The story, which appeared in Hill’s 20TH CENTURY GHOSTS collection, is synopsized thusly: “Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She’s also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945… Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn’t easy to make friends when you’re the only inflatable boy in town… Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he’s an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing… John Finney is locked in a basement that’s stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead…”
