Do we like Hawk Ostby?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A clean search on harm and conduct, but too little public record of his own words or good deeds to score higher.
Hawk Ostby is a screenwriter from South Burlington, Vermont, who still does most of his writing from home there. He teamed up with Mark Fergus when they were struggling writers in New York, and they've been a duo ever since.
Their break was a big one: they co-wrote Children of Men, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and then Iron Man. Early on they decided to stop chasing the market, with Ostby saying “let's just write what we like from now on.” It's a decent origin story for a pair who ended up building a space epic.
That epic was The Expanse. The pair developed the series for Syfy, and their pilot episode, Leviathan Wakes, won the 2017 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The show is full of class tension, with Belters stuck at the bottom of the heap, and the creators have talked about it being about little guys swept up in big events.
On the harm check, the record is quiet. Searches turned up no statements from Ostby on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, either good or bad. Nor did they find any pattern of working with people who push harm. That's the truth of it: an absence of evidence, so we're not handing out a medal.
The most recent news is a work stoush rather than a scandal. In October 2024 Ostby and Fergus left Amazon's God of War series along with showrunner Rafe Judkins, after the studios reportedly wanted a different creative direction and sent the project back to square one. TheWrap carried no statement from the writers, and nothing recent has turned up since.
As for court cases, allegations or reports of bad behaviour on set, there is nothing to report. A search for lawsuits and accusations came back empty. So he passes both tests on the evidence available, but this is a thin file rather than a glowing one, which is why the score sits in the middle.