Long before his fifth Oscar nomination, Ethan Hawke’s first acting award came in the form of a bong.
Not a plaque. Not a medal. A glass bong from High Times.
While promoting Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s new film in which Hawke plays Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, the actor paused to thank his longtime collaborator and dropped a memory that says more about his career than any awards-season talking point.
“My first acting award I ever won was a bong from High Times Magazine,” Hawke told The Hollywood Reporter, recalling his performance in Tape, which was recognized as the “best stoned performance of the year.” Then he added something even more telling: “Somehow having it be a Stony validates my whole youth.”
That was not a throwaway joke. It was a time capsule.
The Stonys Were Not a Gag
In the early 2000s, High Times ran its own parallel awards universe: the Stony Awards. It was a night where cannabis culture, independent film and music collided without asking permission from the Academy.
Steve Bloom’s 2002 coverage of the third annual Stonys reads like a dispatch from a different Hollywood. Snoop Dogg lit up the room and told the crowd, “HIGH TIMES—y’all real for making this awards show.” George Clinton was there. Ice-T was in the building. The Cannabis Cup Band played past midnight.
And in the middle of that, Hawke won Best Actor for Tape.
When he took the stage, Bloom reported, Hawke said, “This is the first award I ever won in my life.” Then he looked around the room and acknowledged what it meant. A Stony, he said, somehow validated his youth.
It is hard to imagine a more High Times moment. An indie actor, in a cowboy shirt, accepting a bong as a trophy in a packed music club in Times Square.
That was not parody. That was culture.
From Stoner Performance to Oscar Nominee
Fast forward more than two decades and Hawke is now nominated for portraying Lorenz Hart, one half of Rodgers and Hart, in Blue Moon. The role required a physical transformation, vocal work and years of patience. He has described it as one of the hardest parts of his career.
Yet when asked to reflect on his journey with Linklater, he did not reach for Sundance, Berlin or the Academy. He remembered the bong.
That says something.
Hawke has built his career on long relationships and difficult roles. He and Linklater met in the early 1990s and have been talking ever since. Films have grown out of that friendship, slowly and deliberately. The Stony for Tape was part of that early era, when independent film felt scrappy and personal, and when High Times was one of the few publications willing to celebrate performances that mainstream outlets would not touch.
The award itself may have been irreverent. The recognition was not.
High Times in the Middle of It
What Hawke’s comment reveals, quietly, is how embedded cannabis culture has always been in serious art. Not as a punchline, but as a layer. Directors, actors, crews and writers have moved through that world, whether they admitted it publicly or not.
Snoop Dogg said it bluntly at that same 2002 show: “We need more award shows like this, because every movie that’s made involves drugs.” It was part provocation, part truth. The Stonys were built on that tension. They acknowledged what the industry pretended not to see.
Hawke did not frame his High Times award as embarrassing or ironic. He framed it as meaningful. As something that affirmed who he was at the time. That kind of recognition tends to stick longer than the shiny hardware.
The Long Arc
There is something poetic about the trajectory.
An actor wins a High Times bong for “best stoned performance” in a claustrophobic indie. Two decades later, he is nominated for embodying a legendary Broadway composer in a tightly constructed period drama. The throughline is not cannabis. It is commitment to the work. The willingness to take risks. The loyalty to creative partnerships.
The bong sits at the beginning of that arc like a wink from the culture that first claimed him.
The Oscars may be the establishment scoreboard. The Stonys were something else entirely. A room where the rules were looser and the trophies could double as functional art.
Hawke has not forgotten that.
And neither has High Times.
