Maya Hawke is hidden behind a whirl of canine fur — her black labradoodle, Lucky, has taken a deep interest in our interview. Eventually the dog is shooed away to another side of the hotel room in Atlanta, where Hawke is shooting the final series of Stranger Things, in which she invariably steals the show as Robin Buckley, an ice-cream parlour worker turned pan-dimensional demon battler.
It’s 9am and the actress-singer-model is tousle-haired and husky-voiced. “I always sound husky in the morning,” she says. “I’m always nervous interviewing music people before noon,” I say. She laughs. “That’s an appropriate thing to be nervous about.” She is a lovely blend of her actor parents: the Roman nose and angled cheekbones are from her mum, the Pulp Fiction star Uma Thurman, while it’s hard to look at the slight upward tilt of the face, showcasing its toothy grin, and not think of her dad, Ethan Hawke (Boyhood, Before Sunrise).
At 25, Hawke is a poster girl for Gen Z — Billie Eilish recently said she was her celebrity crush — and Gen X, having been cast in films by Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Wes Anderson (Asteroid City) and Quentin Tarantino (Once upon a Time … in Hollywood). Her life sounds like a lot of fun, which could be another reason for the huskiness. “Last weekend, I went back to New York City [her home town, where she still lives] and had a couple of late nights celebrating my brother’s graduation.” That’s her younger sibling, Levon, son of Ethan and Uma, who divorced in 2005. “He’s an incredible actor, writer and songwriter,” she says.
Another one in the family? How sickening. “Yeah, it’s definitely, you know, a vomitorium,” she says with a smile. I’ve interviewed lots of “nepo babies”, including the children of Frank Sinatra, Richard Branson and Carly Simon, and Hawke is easily the most comfortable with her status. She recently referred to her family as “the boring indie Kardashians” and sings on Chaos Angel, her excellent new album, about being “born with my foot in the door/ and my mind in the gutter/ and my guts on the floor”.
Her antennae still twitch when the subject comes up, but she never ducks a question. Perhaps Hawke just knows, though she would never be so arrogant as to say it, that the quality of her work proves she got there on merit. You only have to listen to her witty, spectral indie-folk or watch her playing another nepo baby, Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie in Maestro, to know that she deserves to be where she is.
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“‘Deserves’ is a complicated word,” she says. “There are so many people who deserve to have this kind of life who don’t, but I think I’m comfortable with not deserving it and doing it anyway. And I know that my not doing it wouldn’t help anyone. I saw two paths when I was first starting, and one of them was: change your name, get a nose job and go to open casting roles.” She is comfortable about picking option B, even if it opens her up to jokes. “It’s OK to be made fun of when you’re in rarefied air. It’s a lucky place to be. My relationships with my parents are really honest and positive, and that supersedes anything anyone can say about it.”
So comfortable is she with having famous folks that she has worked with both of them in the past year. There was a small part opposite Thurman in a comedy thriller called The Kill Room (“I was excited to get to act with her for a day. I’d never really gotten to do that”) and she played the lead in Wildcat, a biopic of the American short-story writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by her father.
Hawke had long been obsessed with O’Connor, basing her successful audition monologue for Juilliard, the prestigious New York arts school, on the Southern gothic writer’s diaries. Speaking about Hawke’s Juilliard acceptance, her father recently said: “Famous parents can help you get an audition, but they’re not going to get you in.” She didn’t graduate though, dropping out to take up her first big screen role as Jo March in the 2017 BBC production of Little Women.
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On the set of Wildcat, Hawke tried referring to her father as “Ethan” but “couldn’t keep it up” and reverted to “Dad”. Making the film was a blast, she says. “We were both being asked constantly if we were nervous to work with each other but we weren’t nervous, because I spent my whole life making art with that guy.”
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After her parents divorced she lived with him for some of the time at the Hotel Chelsea, the bohemian oasis in New York. “I ran a lemonade stand in the lobby and there was a vacant elevator shaft in the back of my dad’s closet that I used to love to hang out in,” she says. “He used to make these incredible treasure maps that we would follow around the Chelsea and the neighbourhood. It was a magical time.”
When she got older, they would play music, watch films and talk about art long into the night, and the fact that he had written books and directed movies as well as acting showed it was possible to do more than one thing. Hawke’s first ambition was to act on the stage, “but I had this counterweight of being desperate to become financially independent”, she says.
Hence Stranger Things, which paid a lot better than Broadway. It’s always impressive when an actor joins a big TV series midway through and immediately makes you wonder how it had coped without them. That’s what Hawke did in Stranger Things — Robin was angst-ridden yet steely and always believable, even in the uniform of the nautically themed ice-cream parlour Scoops Ahoy.
“I feel so lucky that my, for lack of a better word, breakout role was this smart, funny, awkward and goofy person,” she says. “I didn’t have to be a femme fatale — not that I have what it takes to be one.” Robin was dangled as a love interest for Joe Keery’s lady-killing Steve before revealing that she was gay and becoming his friend instead. “Friendships are so underrepresented on screen, especially friendships between men and women,” she says.
Details of the final season are under wraps, but Hawke says she has full faith in the Duffer brothers, the creators of the show. “Every season there has been something where I’m like, ‘Really, that’s how it happens? Are you sure?’ And then I watch it and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s perfect.’” She and her friends in the cast, who include Sadie Sink (Max) and Charlie Heaton (Jonathan), often talk about Stranger Things ending. “But it’s such an ambitious show that [the crew] are too busy working their asses off to dwell on the sentimentality — except the actors.” Their job is to be sentimental, right? “Yeah, exactly.”
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When she moved into music, like her co-stars Keery and Finn Wolfhard, her shows were full of Stranger Things fans. “I was almost depressed about it,” she says. “Like, I’m glad there are people here, but I guess they don’t care about the music.” Slowly, though, she realised that there was genuine overlap — that the kind of young, smart people, many of them female, who liked Stranger Things could also like her literate, confessional music.
On Chaos Angel, her third album, which is out now, she has written more of the tunes after previously sticking mainly to lyrics. That, she says, was down to Christian Lee Hutson, the musician who produced the album. “He noticed that the melodies that I wrote to my lyrics before I gave them away to somebody else were not terrible and really encouraged me to focus on them,” she says. “That was a huge part of why I asked Christian to produce this record.” And it may have something to do with why he is now her boyfriend.
Missing Out, one of the best songs, is about spending time with her brother and his friends at Brown University, tasting the college life she never had. Acting bleeds into her music as she plays the role of “a funhouse mirror version of myself, how I was afraid people saw me: a drunken, delinquent, bottomed-out actress, hanging out with these younger kids at parties”. The track was also inspired by what happened after she and her brother took a walk in the woods near her mother’s house in upstate New York. “We may or may not have been on magic mushrooms,” Hawke says. “Then we came back and a fire had started in the brush and it was overwhelming to try to put it out. We were like, ‘Are we hallucinating a fire?’”
We talk about Tarantino, who directed her mother in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill 1 & 2, and fell out with her after she was seriously injured in a car crash during the latter shoot, on which he had insisted she do her own stunts. He later described it as “the biggest regret” of his life and Thurman said she had forgiven him. Even so, did Hawke hesitate about working with him?
“I had a lot of different conversations around it with my mum and it was always wildly supported,” Hawke says. She knew Tarantino well, having been a small girl when Thurman was making Kill Bill (Mummy didn’t show her much of that one), and says that working with someone who “had been such an influential part of my mum’s life was really meaningful to me”. In 2021, Tarantino raised the possibility of making Kill Bill 3, saying: “Being able to cast Uma and her daughter Maya would be f***ing exciting.” That looks unlikely to happen but it suggests that things are better between him and Thurman.
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Hawke admits that nepotism influenced her being cast as Flower Child, one of Charles Manson’s followers, in Once upon a Time … in Hollywood. “I’ve been wildly made fun of for this clip when I said, on the red carpet, that I auditioned,” she says. Although she did make an audition tape, “I never meant to imply that I didn’t get the part for nepotistic reasons — I think I totally did”. Tarantino, she adds, loves a bit of postmodern casting and “was making an active effort to cast a lot of young Hollywood”, from Margaret Qualley to Rumer Willis, the daughters respectively of Andie MacDowell and Bruce Willis.
Coming up, Hawke has Inside Out 2, the Pixar sequel about emotions inside a teenage girl’s head, in which she voices Anxiety — very Gen Z. And she is soon to work on Wilder & Me, an adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s novel Mr Wilder & Me, playing the young woman who befriends the film director Billy Wilder while he is shooting Fedora in Corfu in the Seventies. Christoph Waltz plays Wilder and John Hamm is William Holden, the star of Fedora.
“People have accused it of being inside baseball [an American term for a navel-gazing insider’s guide] when they make these stories about the industry itself, but I just love them,” Hawke says. “Maybe it’s because my whole life has been inside baseball.”
Chaos Angel is out now on Mom+Pop
