Maya Hawke, the Stranger Things actor who admits the door was opened for her

Maya Hawke

Photo: Justin Higuchi / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 8, 1998 New York City, United States
Occupation	Actress and singer-songwriter
Known for	Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Inside Out 2, Fear Street: 1994
Awards	Saturn Award · Women's Image Network

Most actors with two famous parents spend their first interviews insisting they auditioned like everyone else. Maya Hawke tried that once, on a red carpet, and later took it back. Asked by The Times of London about the Tarantino part that gave her a first major studio film, she said: “I never meant to imply that I didn’t get the part for nepotistic reasons — I think I totally did.” Few actors say that about themselves, and it explains the shape of her career so far: a performer who knows the door was held open for her and who has spent the years since showing what she does once she is through it, in front of a camera and with a guitar in her hands.

The inheritance runs deeper than a surname. Her parents, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, met while making Gattaca. Her maternal grandfather is the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, her grandmother the model Nena von Schlebrügge. She grew up in New York with dyslexia, changing schools often until she settled at Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, a school that does not grade its pupils’ work and pushes them toward the arts. That was where acting took hold.

She was born in New York City on July 8, 1998, and by her late teens had done summer courses at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the Stella Adler Studio in New York, modelled for Vogue as her mother and grandmother had, and appeared in a Calvin Klein campaign directed by Sofia Coppola. She got into Juilliard’s acting programme and left after a year, when the BBC cast her as Jo March in its 2017 adaptation of Little Women. It was a lead, and it was the role that made casting directors see an actor rather than a famous daughter.

The part that changed everything arrived in 2019. Robin Buckley joined the third season of Stranger Things as Steve Harrington’s sardonic colleague behind an ice-cream counter in a shopping mall, and the scene in which she sits on a bathroom floor and tells Steve she is gay turned the season’s expected romance into a friendship. Robin stayed until the end: the fifth and final season reached Netflix in three instalments, the last on December 31, 2025. The role brought Hawke a Saturn Award and a share of the cast’s Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination.

The same summer she played Flowerchild, one of the Manson followers, in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. What followed was a deliberate mix of genre work and auteur cinema: Heather in the Netflix slasher Fear Street: 1994, the scheming half of a revenge pact opposite Camila Mendes in Do Revenge, a schoolteacher stranded in the desert in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, and Jamie Bernstein, the conductor’s eldest daughter, in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. Her biggest audience never saw her face. As the voice of Anxiety, the new emotion at the centre of Pixar’s Inside Out 2, she was heard in a film that grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide and earned her an Annie Award nomination.

The most personal of those projects began as homework. For her Juilliard audition she built a monologue out of Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, rehearsing it with her father between his takes on another film. Years later that monologue became Wildcat, which Ethan Hawke directed and co-wrote, with his daughter as O’Connor, a young Catholic writer from Georgia struggling to publish her first novel while lupus closes in. It premiered at Telluride in 2023 and opened in American cinemas in May 2024.

That film is also where the family question becomes hardest to dodge. Hawke’s candour about nepotism is real and more useful than the denials common among her peers. In the same Times interview she said she was “comfortable with not deserving it and doing it anyway”, and a year earlier, promoting Wildcat with her father, she argued that the criticism of famous children “has to do with access and opportunity”. Her own record bears that out in an uncomfortable way. Her leading roles have mostly come in smaller films and streaming releases, and the one she originated was directed by her father. The supporting work, where she has had to compete for space beside Tarantino’s, Anderson’s and Cooper’s casts, is where she has been most convincing. The question her career keeps asking is whether she can carry a large film alone.

Music has been the other answer. She released her first two singles in 2019, written with the songwriter Jesse Harris, then the albums Blush in 2020, Moss in 2022 and Chaos Angel in 2024, folk records shaped by Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. Her fourth, Maitreya Corso, came out on May 1, 2026, on Mom + Pop, co-produced with the musician Christian Lee Hutson; its title joins the Buddhist figure Maitreya to the Beat poet Gregory Corso. Reviews split. Paste found the songwriting navel-gazing and the tone uneven, while Stereoboard called it “by some distance, the best thing she’s made”. She toured it through the spring.

Hutson is also her husband. The couple, together since 2023, married in New York on Valentine’s Day 2026, with much of the Stranger Things cast among the guests.

On screen, this year has been busy. She had a supporting role in Will Gluck’s comedy One Night Only, released by Universal in August to mixed reviews. Wishful Thinking, a fantasy romance with Lewis Pullman written and directed by Graham Parkes, won the narrative jury prize at South by Southwest in March and opens in the United States on February 12, 2027, through Sony Pictures Classics. She has finished shooting The God of the Woods, Netflix’s eight-episode adaptation of Liz Moore’s mystery novel, in which she plays the investigator Judy Luptack opposite Kerry Condon. A biopic of Lucia Joyce, the dancer daughter of James Joyce, directed by Aisling Walsh and co-starring Rhys Ifans, is also on her slate.

The nearest test is The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, in cinemas from November 20. Hawke plays the young Wiress, the brilliant, fragile former victor that Amanda Plummer played in middle age in an earlier instalment, here drafted in to help the tributes from District 12. It is a supporting part in the biggest film she has made in years, which suits her: the place where she has always done her best work.