Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Leslie Carole (née Green) and James Steven Hawke. His maternal grandfather, Howard Lemuel Green, served five terms in the Texas Legislature and was a minor league baseball commissioner. Hawke's parents were students at the University of Texas at the time of his birth, and separated five years later. When he was ten, he moved with his mother from Atlanta to New York, where he attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights and then moved to West Windsor, New Jersey, where he attended what is now West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South. He transferred to and graduated from the Hun School of Princeton in 1988. He took acting classes at the McCarter Theatre. His first paid role was at the age of twelve, in McCarter's production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.