Ethan Hawke gets honest about prep for playing famous lyricist in 'Blue Moon': 'It broke my brain'

Ethan Hawke felt "fired from a cannon" in his latest movie, Blue Moon.

Hawke and Richard Linklater’s latest collaboration had the actor memorizing the entire script "like a play" but without the weeks of preparation that plays usually get.

To portray Lorenz Hart in the biopic, The Black Phone star spent hours upon hours "memorizing that text."

"I had more lines on my first day of filming Blue Moon than I'd probably had in 10 years combined," he told People. "It was just a staggering amount of verbiage. And I have a lot of pride in that. I feel like I'm good at it."

"It broke my brain," he added with a smile.

Sharing insight into how he did it, he said, "Hours of memorizing, just the repetition over and over again."

The film, set in 1943, "takes place in real time in one set," in a New York City bar close to the opening of the play Oklahoma!

"I needed to know the whole movie like a play — without the six weeks of rehearsal for a play that you would have. So it was kind of being fired from a cannon," he said.

Despite the hardwork, "it never felt like a job to me," said Hawke, who garnered a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for the film.

Blue Moon, which is Ethan Hawke’s ninth collaboration with Linklater, also stars Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott.