Maya Hawke

The decision to leave Juilliard

Maya Hawke left the prestigious Juilliard School after just one year. It wasn't a youthful whim but an offer from the BBC to play Jo March in the miniseries Little Women in 2017. That move defined her stance on the industry, as she chose the mud of the film set over the academic theory of New York classrooms.

Daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, the actress grew up dodging the weight of two famous last names. Her childhood was marked by severe dyslexia that forced her to attend seven different schools in just a few years. But she found her place at Saint Ann, a school in Brooklyn where art mattered more than perfect spelling.

The industry stopped seeing her as just an heir.

In 2019, her life changed when she joined the cast of the third season of Stranger Things. Her character, Robin Buckley, brought a dry, sarcastic energy that revitalized the Duffer brothers’ series. She got audiences to connect with an ice cream shop employee who speaks several languages and decodes Russian codes between milkshakes.

Refuge in music and independent film

That same 2019, she made a brief appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She played Flowerchild, one of Charles Manson’s followers who leaves the group just before the violence erupts. It was a short scene, but one charged with a tension that showed her ability to command secondary roles with real force.

But film was not her only language. In 2020, she released her debut album, Blush, a delicate folk record she wrote during the months of downtime caused by the global health crisis. Her lyrics avoided easy choruses and focused instead on intimate stories about identity and the fear of failure.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2022, she starred in the Netflix film Do Revenge, a sharp comedy that paid homage to late-'90s teen classics. The movie racked up more than 42 million hours viewed in its first seven days alone. Hawke played Eleanor, a young woman bent on revenge who breaks the mold of the traditional likable heroine.

The maturity behind the camera, like her father

In 2023, she worked under the direction of Wes Anderson in Asteroid City. She played a schoolteacher in a desert setting with meticulous precision, where her style fit the director's obsessive symmetry. That same year, she also appeared in Maestro by Bradley Cooper, playing Leonard Bernstein's daughter in a production aiming for absolute historical rigor.

At the 2023 Venice Film Festival, she presented Wildcat, a film directed by her father in which she played writer Flannery O’Connor. It was a personal project she pushed forward herself after buying the rights to the author’s stories. Critics praised her effort to portray the neurosis and religious fervor of such a complex literary figure.

In 2024, she released her third album, Chaos Angel, and voiced the character Anxiety in the Pixar film Inside Out 2. The movie broke box office records by earning 1,600 million dollars worldwide. Hawke recorded all her lines at a New York studio while balancing promotion with rehearsals for her next music tour.