Ethan Hawke reveals 'regret' he has over daughter Maya's childhood
Topics: Maya Hawke, Celebrity, Parenting, US News, Entertainment
Britt Jones
Featured Image Credit: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Topics: Maya Hawke, Celebrity, Parenting, US News, Entertainment
Ethan Hawke disclosed that his and Uma Thurman's daughter, Maya, had a 'hard' childhood that he regrets.
Maya, who you might know as the LGBTQ+ icon, Robin Buckley, in Stranger Things, is Hawke’s oldest kid, who he had with ex-wife, Uma Thurman.
Hawke, who split from Thurman in 2008 before marrying the ex-couple's nanny, Ryan Shawhughes, opened up about his divorce from Thurman when speaking to The Times.
“The public eye is like gasoline, but what makes divorce hard is the stuff that makes it hard for everyone — the family elements, how to help the kids through it,” he said.
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He added that he 'can’t really talk about this because I vowed to my kids so many times not to talk about the divorce in public', but 'one thing I will say is if you get the privilege of traveling the world, you realize that everywhere men and women have a tremendous amount of difficulty staying married'.
He said: “When I split up I was hellbent on not having any more kids and I wanted to be single for the rest of my life. But then I made a best friend and I liked kissing her.”
While Hawke didn't go into detail about the impact the divorce had on his daughter, he did go on to talk about something a teacher once asked her.
Having been such a supporter of her journey in the entertainment industry, you'd think that there weren't many things he was likely to wish never happened, but during his Variety & CNN Actors on Actors conversation with Sydney Sweeney, he revealed that there were things he regrets 'for her'.
“I knew that she was gonna be a very good one,” he said of her career in acting. “That was her safe place, watercoloring, dancing, singing all throughout her childhood.”
“Anything that had to do with human communication was something she vibrated to,” he said. “I remember some teacher said, ‘Maya, are you happy?’ Cause they were worried about her. And she said something to the effect of, ‘Do you really think that’s the question?’
‘I thought, ‘I love this kid,’” he went on to say. “She was about 13. [Maya said] ‘I don’t think that’s a very interesting question. I think there’s a lot more interesting questions than whether I’m happy or not. Am I happy? No. But I don’t aspire to be happy.’”
Despite this however, Hawke told Sweeney that: “There were a lot of things about her childhood, that were really, really hard and complicated and things I regret for her."
While Hawke didn’t reveal exactly which hardships his daughter had faced, we do know from the actress’ own admission that she has battled with dyslexia for much of her life.
Much like her famous parents, Maya opted to pursue a career in acting and even dropped out of the prestigious Juilliard school in New York to pursue her very first role in the BBC mini-series production of Little Women back in 2017.
From there, multiple roles have followed including in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Stranger Things, and Inside Out 2.
Having grown up in the shadow of two Hollywood heavyweights, Maya has been exposed to the film and TV industry for most of her life – yet even despite her impressive lineage, the actress was keen to ensure she only took on roles she felt she had earned.
She previously told Vogue: “It’s very ordinary to pursue a career that your parents do, but when it’s in the public eye it becomes a complicated thing. I am not in denial about the fact that if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be here today. I’ve thought a lot about how to deal with that, and one way was to not take any opportunity unless I was absolutely positive that I’d earned every scrap of it.”