Entertainment

Hawke of the town

New Yorkers have an unspoken pact about pretending we don’t notice when we see famous people. But there are certain ones who blend in particularly well, who feel like neighbors instead of sightings. Like Ethan Hawke, who is always sort of around. He’s one of us.

Hawke has made a few public screw-ups, especially his 2003 split from wife Uma Thurman over his affair with Ryan Shawhughes, their nanny. (Hawke married her last year.) Despite the scrutiny and occasional ridicule, he stuck with the city, first moving into the Chelsea Hotel, then buying an apartment in the neighborhood. No removed, heavily secured house in the Hollywood Hills for Hawke.

And this year, we’re officially celebrating 20 years of Ethan, the original emo boy, from his start way back in 1989’s “Dead Poets Society.”

He can be kind of a mess — still rocking the unwashed-hair look from the grunge days — yet he’s never sold out. That status will be tested in January, when his “first big genre film,” as he says, is out: “Daybreakers” is a sci-fi movie about a society in which vampires are the norm and humans are a vanishing commodity.

But first Hawke stars in a small, local indie, the noir comedy “Staten Island,” opening Friday. It’s been raising hackles among the borough’s residents for its portrayal of the island as a mob-infested backwoods. “They’re protesting the movie . . . which sounds like a scene from the movie, I think,” he says, on the phone from a cab headed uptown.

He’s here for the weekend to see his three children — two with Thurman, one with Shawhughes — and then it’s back to Malta, where he’s in the middle of filming a miniseries of “Moby Dick,” playing Starbuck to William Hurt’s Captain Ahab.

“Right now I’m obsessively reading the book,” he says. “I always thought I didn’t like it. Reading it a second time, because of the [series], I love it. He’s really the mad genius American novelist. What’s so surprising about that book is how funny and weird it is.”

Hawke has written two novels, both of which received mixed reviews: “His callow cynicism about women and his flattened out, ’90s rendition of Holden Caulfield . . . grow wearisome. But Hawke’s emotionally raw account of a world inescapably contracted is oddly affecting and sure to make many a teenage heart go pit-a-pat,” said Publishers Weekly of his novel “The Hottest State,” which Hawke directed as a film in 2006, here in NYC.

It’s one of many projects he’s done locally, and that’s no accident.

“I have a movie coming out called ‘Brooklyn’s Finest,’” he says, “and I’m also in ‘I Love You, New York.’ I have a passion for this city. I moved here in 1988, fresh out of high school. I love it here. And I’ve made enough movies here that countless pockets of the city remind me of film shoots.”

He also frequently does theater here — he’s set to direct Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind” at the New Group this winter — and he narrated a documentary about the High Line for its opening this summer as a public park.

One of the things he doesn’t share in the doc is his own connection to the place. “I used to sneak up on top of the High Line when I was younger,” he says. “You know, to go drink with the homeless people and try to be cool.”

These days, aside from his participation with the park, it’s highly unlikely you’ll spot him in the nightlife circus that is the Meatpacking District. He’s all about mundane stuff, like taking his kids to birthday parties, walking the dog, jogging.

“I’ve got one of the few dogs that cannot stand the dog park,” he admits. “She thinks she’s too good for it. She’s a border collie, and I take her on runs with me around the city.”

Hawke’s ubiquity was referenced in a recent comedy bit by Todd Barry about Gawker Stalker, the site that compiles star sightings (people may be too cool to ask someone for an autograph, but are never too cool to text about them).

“It’ll be like, ‘23rd Street and Seventh Avenue: Ethan Hawke buying a banana,’” Barry said. “‘23rd Street and Eighth Avenue: Ethan Hawke with a half-eaten banana.’ ‘23rd Street and Ninth Avenue: a banana-less Ethan Hawke running through the streets on some kind of potassium high.’”

Hawke has not heard of Barry, does not read Gawker and almost audibly rolls his eyes at the whole idea of celebrity blogging.

“I feel bad for kids who are just getting famous now,” he says. “If ‘Reality Bites’ had come out now and I had all those people Gawker-stalking me, my life would have been hell. I feel bad for the way pop culture seems to be eating itself alive. It ends up belittling everybody.

“But I mean,” he says, returning to laid-back Hawkean mode, “ultimately, it’s not that big a deal.”