But what happens when that scrutiny is ratcheted up to intense new levels thanks to not only being a star of one of the planet’s most popular TV shows,but also having independently famous,Oscar-nominated actors for parents?
“I’ve grown up my whole life around actors and actresses and artists”:Maya Hawke.Celine Sutter
If you’re 24-year-old Maya Hawke,aka Robin Buckley on Netflix phenomenonStranger Things (her “escape Vecna” song isHere Comes the Sun by the Beatles,for curious fans),and daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman,you find solace in one of your first creative passions:making music.
“I’ve always loved acting and would do it for free if it weren’t my job,but I feel that pressure and that relationship to the public,pressure to one-up the last thing I did,” Hawke says from the flamingo-wallpapered home of Jennifer Kaytin Robinson,the Los Angeles-based director of Hawke’s new film,the teen comedyDo Revenge.
“With the music,I really am doing everything in my power to keep those voices away and to let this part of my life be something where I’m not chasing anything,or trying to have it get anywhere,” she says. “I’m just trying to express myself.”
Hawke’s love of music goes all the way back to her childhood,when her father would sing to her at bedtime.
“I remember when my parents got divorced and I started seeing them separately,and I would go over to the Chelsea Hotel where my dad was living and I had anxiety about going to sleep,” she says.
“My dad would sing me songs to help – old folk melodies where he’d change the lyrics to things like[she sings] ‘Go to sleep,my weary Maya,let the clouds drift slowly by/Tonight you have a nice warm blanket,and this is your daddy’s lullaby’.
Maya Hawke as Robin (left) with Joe Keery and Gaten Matarazzo in season three of Stranger Things.Netflix
“The comfort of them and the storytelling of them was really powerful to me,and I found myself craving it and longing for it. That’s the first music I remember,really,those bedtime stories.”
Hawke’s day job has seeped into her music,with the lyrics ofHiatus,a track on new albumMoss,delivering some gentle ribbing toward male actors.
“I have a brilliant hairstylist who said to me once,when I was complaining about some boy,‘You know,Maya,an actress is a little bit more than a woman,and an actor is just a little bit less than a man.’ It always stuck with me because it really made me laugh.
“So the song is about this feeling of ‘I know how silly and vain and superficial and self-conscious artists can be’. And yet I’ve grown up my whole life around actors and actresses and artists,and I love them and understand them and their faults.”
Hawke saysMoss,her second album,came together quickly when a film project fell through last year,leaving her with some rare time on her hands.
“Instead of two days off I had two weeks,so there was a mad dash of songwriting with me scouring through old journals and collecting things I’d done earlier and finding voice notes and lyrics,” she says.
“It was a very tumbly emotional process,which was where I was in my life at the time. It’s quite a sad record,it was made by a very sad person. I don’t know who she was,but she was very sad.”
That period of Hawke’s life may be steeped in melancholy but the future,she says,is looking bright.
“I just want to keep getting better and keep working with my friends and keep making things I love,” she says. “That feels like the goal for me.
“I want to walk that line of balance between gratitude for the fact there are people who care about my music and want to listen to it,and the original mission of having a private way of expressing myself where it’s not playing a character and it’s not my quote-unquote job.
“I’m just going to try to figure out how to walk that line and,hopefully,I won’t fall off.”
Moss is out on September 23 via Mom + Pop Music.
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