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Ethan Hawke Opens Up About Uma Thurman Marriage, “Sexual Fidelity”

Ethan Hawke
Ethan Hawke opens up in a new interview how he doesn't regret marrying his ex-wife Uma Thurman so young, and how relationships can't hang on "sexual fidelity"; the actor went on to marry the estranged couple's nanny in 2008

It's been nine years since Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman divorced, but the 43-year-old actor is continuing to open up about their past, and how they first fell in love on the set of their 1997 film Gattaca.

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"Gattaca was a great moment in my life and a great moment in Uma Thurman's life, and we fell madly in love and wanted to do all that," Hawke tells Mr. Porter's November 2013 issue of their past relationship. "We tried to be as optimistic as we could be: we all want to believe in love and the possibility of love. The older you get, the more you realize how powerful love is. You understand the right ways for emotion to lead your life and the dangerous ways. I don't regret marrying early." (He previously said in the September issue of Elle that he "had no business taking vows" at such a young age.)

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Hawke and Thurman, 43, were married for six years before divorcing in 2004. The pair have two children together; daughter Maya, 15, and son Roan, 11. Though the Purge actor never claimed to have cheated on Thurman, Hawke did go on to marry the estranged couple's nanny Ryan Shawhughes in 2008. The couple has since welcomed two children together.

"My relationship with my present wife is thrilling to me and I'm committed to it," he said of Shawhughes. "But neither she nor I know what shape the future will come in. Sexual fidelity can't be the whole thing you hang your relationship on. If you really love somebody you want them to grow, but you don't get to define how that happens. They do."

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"People have such a childish view of monogamy and fidelity. 'He's cheated so he's bad, she's cheated so she's bad,' as opposed to a recognition that our species is not monogamous," he continued. "To act all indignant, that your world has been rocked because your lover wasn't faithful to you, is a little bit like acting rocked that your hair went grey."

He added: "Human beings are sexual beings."

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