Maya Hawke has been on a steady rise to the top since her breakout role as Robin Buckley in the third and fourth seasons of Stranger Things catapulted her into the limelight.
Yet despite this, Hawke, 23, claims her parents – Hollywood stars Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman – initially tried to dissuade her from getting into acting
In an interview ahead of the latest season of the Netflix smash hit, Hawke revealed that her parents were originally quite sceptical about letting their daughter follow in their footsteps, despite being famous themselves.
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“They were wary of the public life side of acting and the difficulties of that,” Hawke told The Guardian when asked whether her parents approved of her chosen career path.
“They also tried to protect me from falling into acting. They wanted to ensure I had a strong enough backbone, my own passion for it and work ethic.
"They didn’t want to cart me along every red carpet or have me do bit-parts in their movies. Once I was old enough, and it was clear they were my choices, they were very supportive.”
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When asked which of her parent’s films were her favourites, Maya admitted that she hadn’t seen them all, preferring to watch only ‘happy’ films featuring the two of them rather than ones in which they meet grisly ends.
“Sometimes you don’t really want to watch your mom getting shot or your dad go through painful emotions, even though you know it’s pretend,” she said.
“So mostly I only watch the happy ones. One of my favourite movies of my mom’s is The Producers [Susan Stroman’s 2005 remake of Mel Brooks’s musical], where she’s dancing around being fabulous. That’s much more fun to see than John Travolta jamming a needle into her heart.”
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Yet despite her desire for independence, Maya has nevertheless kept her family’s legacy close to her heart, even at this early stage in her career.
In 2019 she had a small role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which she played one of the Manson cultists tasked with murdering Sharon Stone.
Shortly after that, she took on another role alongside her father in the upcoming comedy Revolver, in which she plays a teenage Beatles fan in the 1960s who becomes obsessed with losing her virginity to Fab Four guitarist George Harrison.
The script for the film was written by fellow Stranger Things alumni Kate Trefry, who also worked alongside Maya in the Netflix slasher series Fear Street: Part Three in 2021.
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Stranger Things is available to stream on Netflix now.
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Topics: Film and TV, Stranger Things, Maya Hawke
Tom Sanders