Warning: Contains spoilers for Stranger Things 3.
Maya Hawke made her big Netflix debut in season 3 of Stranger Things playing the multitalented new teen hero Robin last week—the first time that many viewers have seen the 21-year-old on screen. She stepped into the role as if she’d belonged in that motley monster-fighting crew all along and introduced us to a character who revealed her emotional depth more and more every episode. (She also made me want to lovingly call my dog, or anyone who’s annoying me, for that matter, "dingus.")
Stranger Things is just one of many shows Hawke will appear in, and Robin's already a cult character—so it’s definitely time to get to know the actress herself.
Her parents are Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman.
If you didn’t already catch on from her last name, Maya is the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, who were married from May 1998 to August 2005. Twitter has definitely noticed how much she looks like her famous mom and dad.
Hawke has two siblings, 17-year-old Levon Roan Thurman-Hawke and half-sister Luna Thurman-Busson.
She's 21 years old.
Hawke was born Maya Ray Thurman Hawke in New York City on July 8, 1998, two months after her parents were married. This means that she's just celebrated the big 2-1.
She played Jo March in PBS’s Little Women last year.
Jo March is often thought of as “everyone’s favorite little woman,” because she seems to have the most fun and the most to say. Last May, Hawke appeared as the intelligent, spunky character beside legendary actresses including Emily Watson and Angela Lansbury. Before the series aired last year, Hawke told ELLE how proud she was to be able to portray the popular heroine. “Jo was a big inspiration to me,” she said.
She has a million followers on Instagram (and counting).
Check in on her Insta account for behind-the-scenes shots from the Stranger Things and Little Women set, and photos with friends (including Rolling Stone's Gus Wenner; they seem particularly close).
She has dyslexia.
There’s a reason Jo March was so near and dear to Hawke’s heart. The actress has dyslexia, meaning reading and writing are challenges, but a character like the never-boring Jo kept her wanting more from Louisa May Alcott’s stories. Hawke told ELLE that Jo gave her the “drive and passion to pursue my love for reading and writing, even when it was challenging.”
She dropped out of Julliard for the Little Women role.
Taking on this huge role meant having to step down from another commitment: school. Hawke attended Julliard for two semesters before having to leave so that she could film Little Women in Ireland for four months. Since then, she’s moved on to a flourishing acting career and has not been able to return to the prestigious school. Though she told ELLE last year that acting feels to her “like swimming or breathing,” she found it challenging to leave without completing her time there: “One thing about leaving your training early is that it leaves you with all the tools with which to criticize yourself, without the skills to be able to implement the things that you know you’re supposed to be doing,” she said.
As the child of two mega-watt stars, she resisted acting at first.
Acting is in Hawke’s blood, but she tried to resist its call. In June, she told WWD that she paused before deciding to take on the same career as her parents. “I resisted it a little bit, because it was the family business, until I realized that it made me the most happy and that it was what I was the best at,” she said.
Hawke told WWD that this epiphany came during junior year of high school: “I was like, ‘I don’t know, do I want to get an English degree, what do I want to do?’ I was simultaneously doing a play at my school, and it was the only thing I liked doing. I didn’t like studying for my SAT, didn’t like writing essays, but I felt so alive and capable in the theater at my school,” she says, “and how do you say no to that?”
Maya and Ethan Hawke at the opening night of True West
Her actor parents are very proud of her—obviously.
Thurman and Ethan Hawke seem pretty happy with their daughter’s choice to dive into their industry. On her Instagram last week, Thurman wrote the most "mom" post, brimming with pride.
“My victorious loving mermaid daughter,” she wrote, under a photo of Hawke blissed out in a bright pink mermaid pool floatie. “A weekend of triumph on Stranger Things. Congratulations beloved @maya_hawke.”
In his own Instagram post over the weekend, Ethan Hawke wrote a glowing review of his daughter’s performance in the Netflix series, saying, “Some of you may have missed her in last year’s BBC production of Little Women. Some of you may have missed her work at Juilliard. I know many missed out on numerous high school productions—heck I even missed a few and I’m her father. Some of you may know her music, some may not. But...get to know MAYA HAWKE. She’s the real thing.”
Ethan told People last year that his daughter was always "writing poems and singing songs" before she became an actress.
In an interview with Jenny McCarthy for SiriusXM, Hawke said she is only ever happy when she gets such sweet compliments heaped upon her by her parents: "My parents are wonderful and really supportive and have given me a lot, and I feel really grateful to have their support...I know my parents don’t B.S. me; they’re pretty rigorous with their commentary when they like something or they don’t.”
The actress went on to say that her parents' fame was never something that interrupted or caused her stress in her childhood: “I think if you’re lucky, it’s like you don’t have parents who are celebrities. I was never aware of my parents ever being anything other than my parents. They were loving, and we played games and took train rides. I didn’t feel like I was in a public family, I mean, except for a few kind of horrifying high school moments along the way.”
Maya Hawke and Uma Thurman at Paris Fashion Week 2019
She had never seen Stranger Things before landing the part of Robin.
Hawke admitted to WWD that both her mother and brother are fans of the show, but she had never tuned in. But that didn't stop her relating to the character: “I came into it thinking, ‘Okay, sarcastic, bored with her life, down to earth, Madonna wannabe, cool girl from school but that no one notices.’ And then throughout the season she became more and more like me.”
She is proud of what Robin's coming-out scene did for Stranger Things.
Hawke told The Hollywood Reporter that Robin’s coming-out scene, which comes as somewhat of a shocking twist, was one that she was glad to portray: “It feels wonderful to have a piece of humanity involved in this giant, action-packed drama. It’s such an amazing thing the Duffer Brothers did, stopping the whole show.”
Series co-creator Matt Duffer refers to Robin and Steve Harrington’s relationship as a “John Hughes moment” of the show. He told Collider that they'd paired two seemingly different people for a very specific reason: “It’s sort of that John Hughes thing of putting two teen characters together in close quarters,” Duffer said. "They’re forced to work together, and they start to learn more and more and more about each other and realize there’s more depth to each other than they realized.”
Maya Hawke as Robin in Stranger Things
She is a true New Yorker at heart.
Hawke’s spent time in L.A. and lived in Atlanta filming Stranger Things, but she was born and raised in NYC, where she attended St. Ann’s, a private school in Brooklyn that focuses on the arts. Per WWD, she is back living in the city once again.
She’s got many more roles coming down the pipeline.
In 2018, Hawke was in Ladyworld, a film about eight girls trapped after an apparent earthquake. Next up, she will appear in Human Capital with Marisa Tomei, Peter Skarsgaard, and Liev Schrieber. Following the footsteps of her mother, she’s landed a part in a Quentin Tarantino movie, the upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She also just finished Gia Coppola’s latest, Mainstream, alongside Andrew Garfield and Nat Wolff.