‘I still have impostor syndrome’: The chaos of Maya Hawke (2024)

On a highway somewhere between Atlanta and South Carolina, Maya Hawke is enjoying a brief respite from armageddon. She’s been given a few days off from shooting the final season of Stranger Things, the Netflix hit in which she plays loveable, neurotic video shop clerk Robin Buckley, and the 25-year-old has decided to break up the grind of the lengthy shoot – “We started in January, and we’ll probably be done in January. It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” she deadpans – with an impromptu road trip. By the time she phones through for our scheduled interview, she’s already singing the classics.

“We’ve been listening to a podcast on the history of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte,” she says with a dry laugh, when I ask her for the road trip’s playlist. It’s not Sabrina Carpenter and it’s not the Beatles’ Black Album, the famous mixtape her dad Ethan Hawke once curated for her and later repurposed for his role in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, but it feels delightfully on brand for the most cerebral of Gen-Z’s rising screen stars. “I remember it all pretty well from grade school,” Hawke adds. “I can sing along if I try really hard, shouting out Bastille Day, really vibing with it.”

Beyond the screen, Hawke – the daughter of Ethan and Uma Thurman, who, besides Stranger Things, earned acclaim for her recent performances in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro – is gearing up for the release of Chaos Angel, her third album of thoughtful indie-pop following Blush (2020) and Moss (2022), albums which, while sonically sparse, showcased her sensitive, expressive songwriting. If Moss was her musical unveiling, particularly via its breakout single Therese, inspired by modern artist Balthus’ Therese Dreaming, Chaos Angel elevates her work further, both with its sonic ambition and an increasing boldness in her songwriting.

Take the lead single Missing Out, for example, where Hawke sings about naive kids envying her “television salary” and her own conflicted feelings about “being born with my foot in the door”, as though she’s grappling with the privilege of how she grew up while also wondering if she lost something along the way.

“I don’t see Missing Out as any more revealing than any of my other songs, but it’s possible it’s revealing aspects of my thinking that are more salacious to people in, like, a kind of headliney way,” Hawke concedes, perhaps a weary glare to the nepo narrative that’s become every Hollywood scion’s burden.

The song was inspired by Hawke’s misgivings about having skipped college at 18 in order to live on her own and pursue acting opportunities instead. The decision left her feeling so alienated among her own generation that years later, she tagged onto her brother Levon’s experience at Brown University, where she dropped in on random lectures on the history of Hinduism, Eastern religion, and the history of China for three months.

“Yes, there was a poetic irony to it,” Hawke says, when I suggest most uni kids are trying to get out of class, not get into ones they aren’t even enrolled in. “But it was so fun and so enlightening. I got to sneak into classes and listen to professors talk, and I’m grateful to my brother for allowing me to do that and to talk about it publicly, because both things are slightly embarrassing for him.”

By the time summer break came around, Hawke had found perspective. “I was like, you know what? I like my life. I don’t have any regrets. But I wrote a song about it, so not a total waste of time.”

It’s a strange thing to admit to an interview subject that you might have inadvertently stalked them years ago, when they were merely a child clutching their famous father’s hand during a leisurely stroll around their home neighbourhood, but here we are. It was over a decade ago, I tell Hawke, and my girlfriend and I were tourists in New York, on our way to explore Chelsea’s recently opened High Line, when we stumbled across Ethan Hawke in the streets with kids in tow. Obviously, we did what any Before Sunrise enthusiast would do and surreptitiously walked in the same direction for a string of blocks to see what exciting movie star business he was getting up to.

About 10 minutes later, we gave up out of both shame and boredom. What was surprising, however, was the space and respect his fellow New Yorkers afforded Hawke. He might have attracted the odd head turn, but no one bothered him – just a dude taking a walk with his family. You sense that even with two Hollywood superstars for parents, Maya’s childhood was decidedly sheltered from typical movie star eccentricities.

“One thing that’s wonderful about my parents is that they never had an overblown sense of their own importance,” says Hawke. “They felt like artists, in that their relationship to their work was not as celebrities or famous people, but as people whose job it was to make art. And so they acted like anyone would with that; they just saw it as their job. That’s what I was brought up around, an understanding that a life in the arts is a job and it’s a craft. It’s a beautiful privilege to have that job, but it’s also a job like everyone else’s and it’s not more or less important than anyone else’s.”

Growing up in such an environment, a life in the arts was always likely. “My whole life was drowned in the arts,” says Hawke. “I did every school play, I was always writing songs, I was always doing watercolours, I was always writing poems. Being in New York City, we’d go to the Met, the theatre, see plays on Broadway, things off-Broadway. It just felt like a necessary part of life – you eat, you sleep, you try to move your body, you try to go to school, and you try to consume a little art and make a little art, too.”

In an interview with Variety, Ethan once mentioned he knew the exact moment Maya would follow in her parents’ footsteps, after he brought her along to a technical read through of a Shakespeare play he was in, and was shocked to find she wasn’t bored at all. But when does Maya pinpoint her professional awakening?

“It was doing Euripides’ Bacchae in my junior year, directed by Laura Barnett, at my high school Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn,” she says. “I dove into it completely. I didn’t study for my SAT, I didn’t focus on anything else, I just let myself be an actor and it was the best feeling I’d ever had. It felt like I was home, I loved the community, I loved the friendships I made. That experience, and how positive it was, became kind of like the golden compass, alethiometer, of my life. I was like, OK, I’m gonna chase that feeling.”

Music was a similarly organic pursuit, fuelled by childhood guitar, piano and singing lessons, and the realisation that songwriting was a prime form of communication that persuaded the people around her to listen more.

“I’m still this kind of person who practises for my conversations. Like, if we were roommates and we were gonna have a big talk about the fact that you don’t do the dishes enough, I would practise that conversation in my head a lot, and I would find that putting melodies to my rehearsed conversations and making them rhyme was a better way to remember them.”

Negative preconceptions about actors who make music are prevalent, and Hawke hasn’t been immune. She credits her producer and co-writer Christian Lee Hutson (to whom she’s also been romantically linked) for being “a huge influence in shirking some of the impostor syndrome, though I still have a lot”.

“I still have impostor syndrome but it’s gotten a lot better,” says Hawke. “On my first record I really felt like I had to keep the songs completely bare, like only use acoustic instruments and not double my vocal or have any harmonies because I didn’t want anyone to think that I had, you know, ‘bought a record’ – like, hired a producer to make me sound good. If they didn’t like me, I wanted to make sure they knew that they didn’t like me and not that they didn’t like the choices somebody else had made.

“But I think each record has gotten less constrained by my fear and more playful and more present, and I think it’s just from education. The more you learn, the less afraid you are. Knowledge is power.”

Her confidence is present on Chaos Angel, a warm album that’s more sonically layered than Hawke’s others, with its use of samples, horns, electronics and distortion, inspired by artists she was listening to at the time including Liz Phair, Mazzy Star, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Blake, and our own Julia Jacklin. “About my first few records, people kept writing that they were sparse,” she says. “And I definitely had a goal to have no one say that this was sparse.”

The song Dark, which she’s said “emerged from a major anxiety episode following a soul-shattering break-up”, highlights Hawke’s way with a good line (“I’m your guitar, mute me gently with the palm of your hand”). You can imagine the Notes app on her phone is loaded. “It’s very chaotic,” Hawke admits. “I like to play this game called ‘Notes Roulette’, where you and another person pick a date and you scroll through your phone to find the note you made on that day and you have to read it out loud. Fun game, I highly recommend it,” she adds. “Nothing’s more revealing than a grocery list.”

In a recent interview, Hawke said that Chaos Angel, the album’s titular track, came out of the mindset she was in while making Wildcat, a film she did with her father Ethan where she played author Flannery O’Connor. It seems like being in such a space of imagination and creative empathy offers a fertile overlap for songwriting. “I think they work very well together, and I highly recommend that all actors write music,” she says, noting that acting’s a form of “reaching out” to better understand the world, while songwriting is an act of “digging deep” to figure out what you feel and think.

Each practice lies in a desire to “express, pursue truth and tell stories”, says Hawke, but she admits, as her music career flourishes, that it’s becoming difficult to juggle both. Is there some sort of plan to how she navigates her career or is she just feeling her way through?

“I still audition a bunch and I’ve taken most every good job that’s come my way. I think that a lot of people see the roles that actors choose as, like, intensely reflective on them, and that’s partially true. But also, most actors I know, even really successful ones, are kind of going with the flow and, like, whatever good writing comes their way they want to do, basically,” says Hawke. “I mean, you’d be hard-pressed to find a kind of person that’s more gung ho, ‘put me in, coach!’ than an actor – they’re a pretty excitable group of volunteers.”

Having veterans in her corner (yes, Mum and Dad), only helps to a degree.

“I think people really overestimate the amount of strategy that goes into an actor’s career, you know?” Hawke jokes. “I mean, it’s a lot of auditioning, taking the jobs that come your way, and hoping that more do.

Loading

“The advice I get from my parents is always more minutiae-based – ‘I don’t want to do this job but it’s a good job, would I be stupid not to do it?’ or ‘What should I do if I’m having an uncomfortable experience with my scene partner?’ In terms of what projects to do and how to spend your career, that’s mostly 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent instinct.”

Her next role will see her playing Anxiety in Pixar’s Inside Out 2, a casting stroke that feels inspired considering her public persona – that rare star who appears introverted, slightly uncomfortable with the spotlight.

“Wow, is that my persona?” Hawke says. “I don’t feel like that’s who I am as a person. I mean, of course I have anxiety, but I don’t think I have any more anxiety than the average person. In fact, I might be lucky enough to have a little bit less.”

Loading

OK, but has she ever seen herself on a talk show? There’s a kind of charming, nervous energy there that is a large part of what makes her feel relatable to audiences, despite her atypical upbringing. Is it painful for her to get up on stage, or to see herself on screen?

“I mean, I’m not gonna be like, ‘No, I’m totally comfortable on stage!’ I’m totally nervous and excited, and I feel like I want to express myself and I want to be understood, and I’m afraid that I won’t be or that I won’t be good enough. But it doesn’t feel painful, it’s joyful,” says Hawke.

“There’s a great David Bowie quote about that: ‘You want to be just deep enough in the water so that your toes don’t touch the bottom’. That’s how I feel. I’m happiest when I’m just deep enough out there into the realm of what scares me that my toes don’t touch the bottom, and I can explore that and just, you know, kick my feet a little.”

Maya Hawke’s Chaos Angel is out on May 31.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.