Entertainment

Sunrise settles

What happens after the couple you’ve been rooting for gets their happily ever after? It’s been nine years since we last saw Celine and Jesse, the lovers in Richard Linklater’s smart, talky “Before Sunrise”/“Before Sunset” series.

At the close of the second film, the couple was at Celine’s Paris apartment, Jesse having skipped his flight home to stay with her. Did they or didn’t they? What happened next? Fans have been waiting with bated breath to find out.

(Spoiler alert!) In “Before Midnight,” out Friday, we catch up with them nine years later — and they’re actually in a relationship, contending with all the real-life issues therein.

As played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, the duo first met in 1995’s “Before Sunrise” as 20-something backpackers on a train in Austria, then reunited nine years hence in Paris. Now they’re with their young twin daughters on a family vacation in Greece.

Needless to say, life is still full of complications.

“You don’t get a free pass when you follow your passion,” says Linklater, who co-wrote the film with his two stars, as he did the previous chapters. “And with this relationship, they’re still dealing with the fallout” — in this case, Jesse’s shared custody of his tween son and his hostile ex-wife.

It’s all somewhat messier than the first two films, which mostly saw Hawke and Delpy strolling through a series of beautiful European locations while discussing life, the universe and everything.

“We couldn’t really do a similar vibe to the first two,” Linklater says. “That’s just less likely in your 40s. At a certain age, you do have responsibilities. You can’t just jump off a train with someone.”

Delpy found this time around substantially more creatively challenging. “This film was the hardest to write,” she says. “It’s not exactly the romanticism of the first two films. They’ve been together for years, they’re maybe struggling a little bit, even though, you know, they still connect.”

Part of the expansion of the scope in “Before Midnight” sees the inclusion of other (peripheral) characters, with whom Celine and Jesse and their kids are vacationing.

“We had to see them kind of balancing off other people,” Linklater says. “At this stage of your life, you’re not in your own bubble. You’re friends with parents of your kids’ friends. It felt natural there would be other people swirling around.”

As ever, the film has a loose style of dialogue that many people interpret as being improvised. Nothing could be further from the truth, the trio says. The writing is supposed to feel natural, and it does — but each line is carefully sculpted to seem so.

“Making other movies seems like a vacation in comparison,” Hawke told an audience at a Tribeca Film Festival panel on the film.

The three collaborated on all three films. The only difference, says Linklater, was that he came to the original film, “Before Sunrise,” with screenplay in hand.

“There was a pre-existing script, but I wanted the two people I cast to work with me to rewrite this blueprint,” he says.

The threesome has been fleshing out the idea for the third film for quite some time, Linklater says, and every conceivable outcome for Jesse and Celine was discussed.

“For not only the couple of years we spent conceptualizing it in general, but the intensive weeks we spent working on the script, we probably covered every possible thing you could imagine,” says Linklater. “And if two of us aren’t feeling an idea it goes away really quickly. Everything’s been fully vetted by the three of us by the time we make the film, so yeah, we’ve been through every possible permutation.”

In the version that passed muster with all three, Jesse and Celine got together and stayed together (but have not, and may not ever marry) and had twins “the first time we had unprotected sex,” Celine bemoans to their dinner party friends.

As befitting people who’ve spent a lot of time together, they’re less flirty but more comfortable. They tease each other lightly: She says, half-jokingly, he wishes he was with a “bimbo” who worships him for his minor fame as an author, while he calls her “the mayor of crazytown” for suggesting he’s conspiring to keep her from her career dreams. They’re still in love, but life’s responsibilities are weighing on them — which makes their future almost as uncertain as in the first two films.

Nearly 20 years later, Hawke is far craggier and not quite the sheepish, innocent American he played in the first two movies. Delpy cuts a more curvaceous figure, but none of her beauty or spontaneous spunk is lost. Whenever the two talk, the sparks still fly, whether they’re analyzing the state of their relationship — as they do in a protracted hotel room scene — or simply discussing everyday life as they drive through the Greek countryside with their sleeping daughters in the backseat. Their affectionate sparring — and fearlessness about speaking the truth, even when it’s painful — is why fans of the series have spent so many years rooting for them to wind up together.

Delpy, 43, and Hawke, 42, put so much energy into their characters that it’s hard for fans not to conflate them. Did Linklater ever wonder — or worry — about a real-life hookup between his two stars and collaborators?

“No, never,” the director says with a laugh. “They were just never meant to be. In the best sense of the word. I mean, we’re just such comrades.”

Delpy has a son with film composer Marc Streitenfeld, with whom she has been in a relationship since 2007. Hawke has two children from his first marriage to Uma Thurman and two daughters with his second wife, Ryan, whom he wed in 2008.

“We’re very good friends,” Delpy says. “We help each other constantly. We’re creative partners, and we want the best for each others’ characters.”

True to their convictions, the film never strays into the easy gender role-playing that so often happens in a rom-com. And it’s deeply personal: The fast-paced, witty banter between the two — often self-deprecating, or playfully argumentative — usually stems from one of the writers delving into their own insecurities.

“If someone in the film says something mean to the other one, it’s probably something we’ve heard about ourselves,” Linklater says.

Delpy says they’ve tried, from the beginning, to stay away from other stupid rom-com gimmicks as well. “We’re trying to get close to reality,” she says, citing a scene in which Celine — while topless — first gets into bed with Jesse, then stomps around the room arguing with him.

“No one has sex with a bra on,” she points out. “You’re having an intimate moment with your boyfriend or husband, you’re not going to have your bra on. And when she starts arguing with him with her breasts out — it’s very funny. It’s hard to stay in the argument.”

Humor is good, says Delpy, but Celine is anything but a lightweight. “She’s not all cute,” she says. “You know, it seems like in all the romantic comedies that the woman is one-dimensional, really nice.”

Personally, Delpy says, “I’d rather commit hara-kiri than become a submissive woman.” Which hews fairly closely to Celine’s line of thinking; one of the major plot points in the film sees the couple debating whether she should take a job in Paris or make a more family-centric move with Jesse.

On the eve of the release of “Before Midnight,” Linklater, who’s about a decade older than his actors, sounds like a proud dad as he looks back on Delpy and Hawke’s creative trajectories.

“It’s been rewarding to have a front-row seat to such creative lives,” he says. “I mean, they were about 23 when we did the first one — they were already accomplished then. They’ve both directed movies, they’re both writers, performers. Our creative relationship is remarkably similar to what it was the first time. We sat in a room and pushed each other and rewrote the script and created these characters.”

sstewart@nypost.com