The exact moment Maya Hawke knew she wanted to follow in the family business

The rise of Maya Hawke has been a joy to watch. Starting her career as a model, she made her major acting debut as Jo March in the BBC adaptation of Little Women. Her breakout role as Robin in Stranger Things soon followed, and she has since appeared in films like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Maestro, and Asteroid City. All of this comes in addition to her burgeoning music career, which has already produced three studio albums.

Hawke was always going to do well in life, considering where she comes from. She’s the eldest child of actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, so opportunities were never going to be hard to come by. She still needed to actually pursue a career in the business, however, and that spark was lit by her own father.

Both Ethan and Maya shared an interview with Variety, where the former explained how the latter caught the acting bug. The moment came when Ethan was starring as Autolycus in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, which Sam Mendes directed. “I didn’t have a babysitter for Maya, so I brought her to the tech rehearsal, which is insanely boring,” he recalled. “We do the whole play, stopping and starting as they adjust the lights, not in costume.”

Anyone who has ever done amateur dramatics will know how dull a technical rehearsal can be, so Ethan was fully expecting his daughter to hate every second of it. He planned to send her home before the second run-through, but she had other ideas. “Maya was like, ‘Can I please watch it again?’” he continued. “It’s a three-hour play. It’s Shakespeare. I went, ‘Wow. It’s on.’ If you want to watch a Shakespeare play dress rehearsal two times in a row when you are 12… that’s what you’re going to do with your life.” Or, as Maya deftly put it, “You have some serious issues.” 

According to Maya, she had been relatively shielded from her parents’ fame while growing up. “I’ve met kids who grew up in entertainment industry families and didn’t get to go to Disney World,” she said, explaining that this wasn’t the case for her. “The worst-case scenario is you have to take a picture with someone. That’s a way more normal event than you not interacting with society at all.” 

A teenager star himself, Ethan was very aware of the dangers of his daughter following him into that world. He recalled working with River Phoenix, whose struggles with drugs and alcohol led to his tragic death aged just 23. “When a young person would get nominated for an Oscar, he’d say, ‘The best thing that person can do is go to a monastery for a year and not take the next 10 jobs that are about to come their way,’” Maya recalled her father saying to her. “I picked up on that philosophy over time.”

In the end, Ethan needn’t have worried about Maya going off the rails, as she’s handled her stardom to fame extremely well. As the voice of Anxiety in Inside Out 2, she was a major part of the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, and she’s set to appear in an upcoming biopic of acclaimed film director Billy Wilder. She even found time to collaborate with her father on the 2023 film Wildcat. Ethan wrote and directed the picture, while Maya played the lead role of novelist Flannery O’Connor.

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