Maya Hawke
Maya Hawke is an actor, born 1998.
Maya Hawke was born in New York in 1998, the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, and began in modelling before making her screen debut as Jo March in the BBC's 2017 adaptation of Little Women. Two years later she joined Stranger Things as Robin Buckley and stayed through the show's final season in 2025.
Robin is the role that explains her appeal. She is a fast, self-interrupting talker with comic timing that runs slightly ahead of everyone else in the scene, and dropping that into a cast who had settled into a rhythm gave the series a jolt it badly needed at that point. The same quality is why the flat, metronomic style of Asteroid City suits her, and why casting her as Anxiety in Inside Out 2 works so well: the character is essentially that verbal engine with the brakes removed.
The film work has been deliberately varied rather than safe. A few well-used scenes as Flowerchild in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Heather in Fear Street: 1994, a nastily good lead in Do Revenge, and the most ambitious thing she has attempted, playing the writer Flannery O'Connor in Wildcat. She is also a working musician with three albums, Blush in 2020, Moss in 2022 and Chaos Angel in 2024, and she is lined up to play Wiress in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
Movies (11)
TV (5)
Where to start with Maya Hawke
Most people arrive through Stranger Things, where Robin is the rare late addition who improves a show rather than diluting it. Start there, but do not stop.
Asteroid City fits her better than it fits much of its cast, because the deadpan house style is close to her natural delivery. Do Revenge hands her a lead and the chance to be genuinely unpleasant, which she takes with both hands. Wildcat is the one to judge her on: playing a real writer with a difficult, prickly voice is a much harder assignment than anything else on this list.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is a handful of scenes, well used. Inside Out 2 converts her comic timing into Anxiety and is the most purely enjoyable thing here.