Ethan Hawke is a movie star with a becoming dash of on-screen humility, but is he a character actor? When Aisling Walsh cast the Boyhood star as a reclusive, uneducated, explosively violent Nova Scotian in her new period film, Maudie, she wagered she could draw something more out of a guy who’s generally seen projecting various shades of his sensitive Gen-X self.

“I was a huge fan for years and you just get hints, sometimes, of what an actor is capable of,” the Irish filmmaker tells the Straight, in a call from London, England. “It’s a very silent part, it’s a very thoughtful part, and sometimes actors like to do that—not have to say very much, and just be. I felt that he might not be offered a role like this one very often, and therefore he might want to do it.”

He did want to do it, very eagerly, no doubt partly drawn by the opportunity to work beside Sally Hawkins in a film that’s largely a two-hander about an eccentric, ultimately celebrated real-life couple. Opening Friday (April 14), Maudie tells the story of Maud Lewis, whose colourful portraits of the wildlife and landscape surrounding her remote Nova Scotian home would turn the near-disabled amateur painter into one of Canada’s most beloved folk artists.

If Hawke disappears behind his squint as Maud’s almost nonverbal husband, Everett—Walsh praises his embodiment of the unprepossessing fish peddler as “phenomenal”—Hawkins’s metamorphosis inspires a kind of awe as she contorts herself into a figure whose growth was interrupted at the age of four by juvenile arthritis. Remarkably, except for some fake knuckles and a hump that grows as the character ages—Maudie observes these two supremely odd ducks from the late-’30s until her death in 1970—no prosthetics were used.

“The rest is all Sally,” says Walsh, who recalls the British actor showing up on set and asking “in Maud’s voice” for a paintbrush. “And you could sense this intake of breath from everybody, and that’s when you saw that it was going to be extraordinary. But that’s what Sally does as an actor and that’s what Ethan does as an actor. I knew she would transform herself, utterly.”

A part of Newfoundland was also transformed, utterly, when the production built a near replica of the Lewis’s tiny, unheated house on one of the province’s lonelier coasts. The original resides in a museum in Halifax, and it’s there, Walsh says, that her journey with Maudie began and ended.

“Their souls are still in that house, both of them,” says the filmmaker, whose last biographical subject was Dylan Thomas. “I went back many times with the DOP and the designer because we painstakingly re-created it as near as we could. There’s always something kind of magical, if that’s the right word, when you make a film about somebody’s life. It feels like those people are kind of watching over you. You’re wondering, ‘What would Maudie think of this?’ ”