The WSJ Magazine
highlights from last July 29
5. Maya Hawke on Stranger Things, Working With Quentin Tarantino and Staying in Touch With Her Generation
The acting daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke is becoming a star in her own right.
In the Stranger Things world of small town Hawkins, Indiana, Hawke’s character Robin works with Steve (played by Joe Keery) at Scoops Ahoy, the ice cream shop in the shiny-new Starcourt Mall’s food court. The two have a bantering, sometimes acrimonious relationship at first. When things once again go terribly wrong in Hawkins, Robin and Steve are part of the “Scoops Troops” quartet alongside the younger kids Dustin (played by Gaten Matarazzo) and Erica (Priah Ferguson), fighting Russians who have an underground command center beneath the mall. She and Keery’s character bond when they’re imprisoned by the Russians. They escape while high on truth serum, their antics making for some of the season’s funniest scenes. “Joe is one of those actors who walks into a room and immediately sees all the things in the room that could be funny,” says Hawke. “That’s a really exciting person to work with, to bounce off of that.”
For much of the season, it seemed like Steve had finally found a romantic interest in Robin, who could both handily make fun of him and translate Russian communications with impressive speed. But when he tries to tell her as much, she surprises him by coming out. “Throughout filming, we started to feel like she and Joe shouldn’t get together, and that she’s gay,” says Hawke. “Even when I go back and watch earlier episodes, it just seems like the most obvious decision ever.”
For someone spending her 21st birthday cooped up in an interview, Hawke is cheerily untroubled—and barefoot, having unbuckled her white patent sandals and curled her feet under her, chatting about how she’s already celebrated while swiveling around in an office chair. “I was in upstate New York, which is where I grew up [spending] weekends, and I had six or seven friends out at my house out there with my mom,” she says. “We just cooked dinner from food we grow out in the garden.”
Her slight flower-child persona is in evidence at work, too; she walked into the premiere of Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood last week in a full gilded flower crown, having played a hippie-ish Charles Manson follower who’s having a moral reckoning. The film is a retelling of the 1969 murders through the eyes of Sharon Tate’s fictitious neighbor, a Hollywood has-been played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his stunt double/handler/friend (Brad Pitt). “No one gets to make a movie the way Quentin gets to,” Hawke says. “We did the scenes a hundred times in different ways and shot it from every possible angle and it was really freeing and fun and playful and we pulled [four] all-nighters or something exhausting like that.” |
