Maya Hawke: Biography, Actor, Musician
Liam Parker
Updated on March 30, 2026
1998-present
Latest News: Maya Hawke Makes Waves as Anxiety in Inside Out 2 Trailer
Nine years after the beloved Pixar original released, fans are gearing up for Inside Out 2 as the sequel’s first trailer dropped November 9. The upcoming movie features a new emotion: Anxiety, who is voiced by rising star Maya Hawke. In the trailer, the other emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust—are surprised by Anxiety and the abrupt changes she introduces. “Anxiety... might be new to the crew, but she’s not really the type to take a back seat,” the movie’s director Kelsey Mann said in a news release. “That makes a lot of sense if you think about it in terms of what goes on inside all our minds.” Hawke co-stars with Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, and Liza Lapira. Inside Out 2 heads to theaters on June 14, 2024.
Who Is Maya Hawke?
The daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke is an actor and musician most prominently known for her role in Netflix’s Stranger Things. The rising star has also appeared in several movies. Her cameo in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood as a member of the Manson family opened the door to bigger parts in Do Revenge, Asteroid City, Wildcat, and The Kill Room. As a musician, she has released two self-produced albums, most recently 2022’s Moss.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Maya Ray Thurman Hawke
BORN: July 8, 1998
BIRTHPLACE: New York, New York
PARENTS: Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer
Early Life and Parents
Uma Thurman and her daughter Maya Hawke attend an event in April 2013. Maya’s father is Ethan Hawke.
Maya Ray Thurman Hawke is the older of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke’s two children. Both well-known actors, her parents met in 1996 on the set of sci-fi/romance thriller Gattaca and welcomed Maya on July 8, 1998, a few months after their wedding that May. She was born in New York City.
Maya’s younger brother, Levon, was born in January 2002. She also has three younger half-sisters, one on her mom’s side and two on her dad’s side. After seven years of marriage, Thurman and Ethan Hawke divorced in August 2005.
As a child, Maya was diagnosed with dyslexia and says she was even kicked out of school for being unable to read. She then enrolled in a school for children with learning disabilities and eventually learned to read, though she told NPR in a 2020 interview that she’s still “limited.”
Hawke grew up in Brooklyn where she attended Saint Ann’s School. As she got older, she took to modeling and has since appeared in campaigns for AllSaints, Calvin Klein, as well as gracing the pages of Vogue. But her true passion was for acting. Hawke performed in school plays and attended summer acting camps. But it wasn’t until later in high school that she began to seriously consider becoming a professional actor. After high school, she enrolled at Juilliard. She dropped out after just a year, however, to begin her career.
Stranger Things
Hawke told The Guardian that her parents were initially against her following in their professional footsteps. “They were wary of the public life side of acting and the difficulties of that,” she said. “They also tried to protect me from falling into acting. They wanted to ensure I had a strong enough backbone, my own passion for it, and work ethic. They didn’t want to cart me along every red carpet or have me do bit-parts in their movies. Once I was old enough, and it was clear they were my choices, they were very supportive.”
Maya Hawke with co-star Joe Keery on a Season 4 episode of Stranger Things
Hawke made her acting debut in BBC’s 2017 TV adaptation of Little Women. Her first movie was Ladyworld (2018), a thriller that’s based on the Lord of the Flies novel by William Golding. But her first big break came in 2019 when she joined the cast of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things, then in its third season. Her performance as Robin Buckley quickly earned acclaim, with Hawke winning a Saturn Award that year for Best Supporting Actress in a Streaming Presentation. Then in 2020, Hawke and her castmates were nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
Hawke returned to the role in Season 4, earning a nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Streaming Drama Series for the 2022 Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards. She is set to again star in the show’s final season, which will reportedly start filming before the end of 2023.
In an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Hawke said that she wouldn’t be closed off to the idea of Robin, who is a lesbian, having a girlfriend going into the series finale but wants to avoid forcing a relationship for the sake of simply including it in the narrative. “I also love characters where their love life is not the center of their existence,” Hawke explained.
Hawke has also mentioned being comfortable with her character receiving the proverbial (and possibly literal) ax going into Season 5. “It’s the last season, so people are probably going to die,” Hawke told Variety in 2022. “I would love to die and get my hero’s moment. I’d love to die with honor.”
Movies and TV Shows
Maya Hawke and her father, Ethan Hawke, collaborated on the 2023 biopic Wildcat. Maya stars as Flannery O’Connor, and Ethan was the movie’s director.
Hawke’s earliest roles were in television, but she has quickly accumulated several credits on the big screen. In 2023 alone, she has appeared in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, Wildcat, and The Kill Room. Wildcat was directed by her dad, and The Kill Room stars her mom. Hawke has been vocal about how much she enjoys acting alongside her parents, saying, “I love working with both of them. They’re really awesome, and they’re just amazing at their job.” Her next movie is Maestro, which opens in theaters on November 22, 2023.
Hawke has appeared in the following movies and TV shows throughout her career:
In 2017, Hawke made her acting debut in the BBC’s three-part TV adaptation of Little Women, based on the famed Louisa May Alcott novel. Hawke portrayed Jo March in a role she called “very special” and wanted so much that she dropped out of Juilliard to take it. She felt drawn to the part and later said she had been “preparing for this character my entire life.”
Alcott’s novel is special to Hawke, who has dyslexia, because it was one of the first books she read on her own.
In Human Capital (2019), Hawke played Shannon, the rebellious daughter of Liev Schreiber’s character, Drew Hegel. As Shannon maneuvers a troubled relationship, additional factors—including the greed and lack of empathy from much of the main cast—threaten the dynamics of her family as well as the wellbeing and lives of other characters.
Hawke appeared in The Good Lord Bird with her dad, Ethan Hawke, who executive produced the 2020 Showtime series that’s based on a 2013 novel of the same name. Maya portrayed Annie Brown, the daughter of Ethan’s character, John Brown.
In the 2020 movie Mainstream, Hawke portrayed YouTuber and struggling bartender Frankie Cabot. When Frankie meets the eccentric Link (played by Andrew Garfield), the two begin a working relationship that turns into something more when she uploads a video to her YouTube channel that goes viral. Although Frankie, Link, and a friend are able to ride the wave of viral success for a little while, it all starts coming apart and results in devastating consequences.
Hawke played the long game in Do Revenge (2022) as Eleanor, a shy private school student who teams up with another student to enact a revenge plan for a leaked sex tape and a (mostly) long-forgotten rumor. Hawke’s character leads the dark comedy alongside Camila Mendes, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Sophie Turner.
Wildcat stars Hawke as American writer Flannery O’Connor. Directed by Hawke’s dad, Ethan, the biopic pulls from O’Connor’s works to tell the story of the writer’s life including her battle with lupus. In an interview with Variety, Ethan credits his daughter with coming up with the idea to create the movie saying, “Put simply, I’m a nepo dad!” flipping the script on the infamous “nepo baby” concept.
“I had moments of insecurity about it while we were shooting the movie,” Maya said of working on Wildcat alongside Ethan. “My dad has been a massive teacher for me, and we want to work together. We like being with each other.”
Appearing opposite her mother, Uma Thurman, and Samuel L. Jackson, Hawke had a supporting role in the comedic thriller The Kill Room. The movie, which centers around a money laundering scheme in an art gallery, released in September 2023 to modest praise.
Hawke is set to appear in Maestro as Jamie Bernstein, one of three of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein’s children. The film, directed and starring Bradley Cooper, focuses on Leonard’s tumultuous relationship with his wife, actor Felicia Montealegre, and how his multiple affairs affected his marriage, work, and family life.
Net Worth
Hawke’s estimated net worth is approximately $3 million thanks to her modeling and acting roles. According to Seventeen, Hawke “likely” earned between $200,000 and $250,000 per episodeof Stranger Things.
Music Career
Maya Hawke performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in March 2023.
In addition to her creative pursuits as an actor and model, Hawke is also an indie-folk singer and songwriter. Hawke released her debut album, Blush, in August 2020, followed by another album, Moss, in September 2022. She performed her song “Thérèse” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in March 2023.
Having a full-time music career isn’t something Hawke has said she’s interested in. She told Vogue in 2019 she views music as a way to communicate her poetry. “Since I was a little girl, I was always writing poetry and trying to put it to music, sitting on the couch with my dad singing old folk songs, like Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt and Johnny Cash,” Hawke said. “It seems to me, in this day and age, that the best way to communicate and translate poetry is through music.”
Personal Life
Appearing on a June 2023 episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Hawke shared a funny anecdote about the most trouble she ever got into when she lied to her parents. “I said I was going to therapy, and I really went to lose my virginity,” Hawke said, adding that her dad was “very, very upset.”
Hawke identifies as queer and remains mum on her relationships. In 2019, she was thought to be dating Rolling Stone executive Gus Wenner and has also been linked to musician Spencer Barnett and actor Tom Sturridge.
Quotes
- On working with her dad while filming Wildcat: I started using his name, Ethan, to be like, “I’m a professional.” And then I realized it was actually more distracting to people. They’d be like, “Why are you doing that?” So I mostly called him dad.
- On being part of a famous family: We’re like the boring, indie Kardashians.
- I got into acting because there was nothing else I could imagine doing.
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Daisy Hernandez is a reporter, editor, and content creator with a background in print and digital media and has written for Sports Illustrated, Popular Mechanics, and Bicycling magazines. She loves to cook, frequently testing out new recipes on friends and family, and is a big fan of prehistoric science, travel, Halloween, trivia, and dogs. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter.
Adrienne directs the daily news operation and content production for Biography.com. She joined the staff in October 2022 and most recently worked as an editor for Popular Mechanics, Runner’s World, and Bicycling. Adrienne has served as editor-in-chief of two regional print magazines, and her work has won several awards, including the Best Explanatory Journalism award from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. Her current working theory is that people are the point of life, and she’s fascinated by everyone who (and every system that) creates our societal norms. When she’s not behind the news desk, find her hiking, working on her latest cocktail project, or eating mint chocolate chip ice cream.
