Ethan Hawke and ‘The Lowdown’ Creator Tease the “Extremely Satisfying” Finale and Season 2 Hopes

[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for The Lowdown.]

From creator/writer/director/EP Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs), the FX series The Lowdown follows citizen journalist Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke, who’s also an EP), a self-proclaimed truthstorian in Tulsa, Oklahoma who dives into an exposé focused on the Washberg family when things start to spiral out of control. After black sheep Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson) dies and suicide is suspected, Lee isn’t convinced and starts down a path that leads him from his grieving widow Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn) to his brother Donald (Kyle MacLachlan) and a host of other colorful characters with mostly ill intentions, all while trying not to disappoint his daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). A basically good guy with a knack for getting beaten up, Lee’s heart is in the right place, even if he can’t manage to stop bringing danger to his own doorstep.

During this interview with Collider, Harjo discussed what he learned from Rez Dogs, and finding the right balance of themes and tone for The Lowdown. He and Hawke also talked about the father-daughter dynamic at the heart of the series, figuring out how to incorporate Dale into the story, wrestling in the mud with Peter Dinklage, finding the humor, and the plan for Season 2.

Creator Sterlin Harjo Learned a Lot From ‘Reservation Dogs’ That He Applied to Making ‘The Lowdown’

“It’s about everybody in this community.”

Collider: Sterlin, what did you learn from Rez Dogs that you were able to draw on or carry over for this series?

STERLIN HARJO: Every project, I’ve come away with more confidence in my abilities and more confidence in trusting myself and my instincts, so there’s that. But then, also, what I fell in love with while making Reservation Dogs was genre. We were doing these episodes that were dabbling in different genres as we would go, whether it was horror, or a Dazed and Confused episode, or more of a crime or heist episode. What I found is that I just loved those parameters. I loved being able to tell a story within the parameters of genre because you can almost say more than just having characters say everything you’re feeling because it digs into people’s psyche and it really implants whatever you’re trying to say. That’s what I fell in love with.

We also had a bit of a magic trick with Reservation Dogs, where it was about four kids, but it also became about a community, and I didn’t know how possible that would be. It was all experimental as we were doing it, and people loved that. This show is all of those great things about Reservation Dogs. In this show set in Tulsa, it is a genre. It is a crime show. It’s about Lee, but it’s also about his daughter and parenthood. It’s also about his community of people and neighbors that help him in his endeavors and try to talk him out of things and into things. It’s about everybody in this community. That’s what I brought from Reservation Dogs. People talk about the tone with the humor and the drama, side by side, and the darkness. That’s the tone that naturally comes from me, and I just follow that.

Ethan, a lot of things happen to you in this series. Lee gets beaten up, stuck inside the trunk of a car, tied up and force-fed caviar, and beaten up again. Did you enjoy all of that? Did this feel like a physically trying series to make?

HAWKE: What I loved was playing a character who wasn’t afraid to put his arm through a propeller. If what’s on the other side is important, he’ll walk through it. That kind of passion and desire to follow your dream and to get what you want, I just admire. It’s also a great source of humor. It’s just hysterical. We’re so used to seeing guys in action movies that somehow are good at action. Lee is not good at action. He doesn’t want to be in a fight. He’s not particularly good at fights. I just enjoyed it.

The Father-Daughter Relationship Is the Heart of ‘The Lowdown’

“The dance is him trying to be a good father while also seeking the truth and getting beat up.”

Image via FX

What interested you both in the father-daughter dynamic in this?

HARJO: That’s the heart of it for us. It’s what connects he and I. The dance is him trying to be a good father while also seeking the truth and getting beat up. Some of that comes from when I was a young independent filmmaker, trying to make a living, and co-parenting and raising a daughter. I did not always have the best living situation, but she always knew I was making films and I was doing this thing that I dreamed of. I was showing my daughter how to live your dreams and how to really pursue and be an artist. At the same time, she’s seen the downside to that. You have to balance safety versus your passion. Unless you’re just a deadbeat and you leave, how do you raise your kid in a safe way while also pursuing what you love and what your dreams are? And then, once Ethan and I started talking about that, he had similar experiences as a father. That idea, right there, is something that we could explore for 20 seasons.

HAWKE: That’s the pulse of the show. That’s who you’re doing it for. If your passion is the truth in storytelling, then who are you doing it for? You’re doing it for your kids. You’re doing it for the future. He’s a truthstorian. How does the past impact the present, which shapes the future? Francis, his daughter, is the future. She’s the reason he’s doing it all. At the same time, sometimes the behavior is hurting her. That collision is the stuff of real life. That’s where I think the show almost leaves genre for a minute and gets into something more substantive, but it’s still in that playful tone.

I love the unexpected aspects of the storytelling, like in the moment in episode three when Tim Blake Nelson shows up to read his own letter and is sitting there with Lee and Francis. What was that scene like to figure out and shoot?

HAWKE: It’s a great question because we didn’t know the answer to it. Tim is such a wonderful actor. He was really game. We weren’t sure if we were going to use that. We were experimenting with the tone of this show.

HARJO: We literally brought Tim Blake in, just to experiment and see if we needed to do that. We were figuring out the show early on. And that just worked so well.

HAWKE: He’s so game and he’s so interesting. It knocked the show off balance, in a good way. Lee is a guy that lives in his imagination. Books and ideas and letters are real to him.

It was such an interesting way to use a character like that, who’s gone from the beginning of the series.

HAWKE: Yeah, he dies in the opening shot.

HARJO: We wanted Dale to be in the background of every episode. Lee is trying to discover what happened to him, and what better way to keep him alive than to let him come back some to read these letters?

This series does a great job of introducing characters in very memorable ways. We get to meet Peter Dinklage’s character exiting a bathroom. What was it like to bring him in and throw him into the dynamic with Lee?

HARJO: Peter was a fan of Reservation Dogs, and I was a giant fan of his. We share an agent. They set up a coffee, and I had coffee with him. He mentioned, “I’d love to work with you someday.” And I said the same. I kept that in my head, and as this Wendell character was being invented, he was the first thought. I talked to Ethan about it, and their history together is so vast and deep, and I didn’t know. I don’t think anyone knows, really. He started telling me about their friendship, and that became a part of the story, as well. They’ve been working together for a long time.

HAWKE: I’ve directed him. We were a part of a whole theater community in the early 90s, with a lot of wonderful actors in New York. It’s the foundation of who I am, and Peter is a part of that. The formative ideas of what it means to be an actor, I came up with at three in the morning with Peter Dinklage, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Steve Zahn, Laura Linney and all these wonderful people. And so, when Sterlin said, “I’ve got this idea for this character for Peter Dinklage,” we’d never been on film together.

Peter’s first day on set, he showed and we were supposed to wrestle in the mud and be yelling at each other. If that had been anybody else in the world, I don’t know how that would have gone. Peter arrived on set, and I was like, “Get over here, I’m going to throw you in the mud!” And he was putting his finger in my ear. We couldn’t have done that [otherwise] . We knew who these guys were and we knew their past because it’s not that dissimilar to our past.

HARJO: It’s part of what makes it such a fun episode to watch. You can feel their love and friendship and history together.

Ethan Hawke Is Happy With How This Season of ‘The Lowdown’ Ends

“It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done.”

What is the plan for this series? Does this season end with any kind of closure? Are you hoping to continue telling the story?

HAWKE: Sterlin wrote it, so he can’t say this, but as the person who jumped off a cliff with him, not knowing where the story was going because I had to say yes to this project before there was any script to read, one of the things that makes me so happy is how the show ends. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done, the finale of this series. What’s fun about it is that it works like a crime novel. It’s extremely satisfying, and you want to see where the hero goes next. Walter Mosley is part of Sterlin’s brain trust on this project, and he’s a great novelist. He has this series of books that star Easy Rawlins. Denzel [Washington] did one withDevil in a Blue Dress. What’s great about the Easy Rawlins books is that each one is its own thing, but you get to know the characters and the world, and you see friends reappear and not reappear. I think we could have a great future with it, and we might even only get better at it.

HARJO: Yeah, that’s what the plan is.

Release Date

September 23, 2025

Directors

Sterlin Harjo

Writers

Duffy Boudreau, Scott Teems, Sneha Koorse

The Lowdown airs on FX and is available to stream on Hulu. Check out the trailer: