Actress uses storytelling to overcome dyslexia challenges
Maya Hawke portrays lead character Jo March in Little Women series
PASADENA, CALIF.— Actress Maya Hawke has always been trapped in a dilemma. She loves reading, storytelling and acting, but she’s dyslexic. For someone who has to execute cold readings and master acres of dialogue, this can be a serious problem.
“I really struggled growing up with reading and writing,” she says. “My relationship to the page, to reading language was an antagonistic one, a real challenge for me.
“And so when I discovered that, through acting, you can speak a beautiful language aloud and have a relationship to language that isn’t one that’s just eyes-to-page, pen-to-page ... it really opened my heart and made me feel like I could be a storyteller. I could do that too. I was hooked.”
Hawke, 20, has good reason for an open heart. In her very first professional role, she is starring as Jo March in the Masterpiece miniseries Little Women, premiering Sunday on PBS.
Based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, the two-part drama features Hawke as the tomboyish and bookish sibling of three sisters who must struggle during the deprivations of the Civil War, passing into womanhood.
She admits she was terrified to take on the task. “I had to make a lot of big choices to take the part. I had to leave school. I was studying at Juilliard and, in order to do this project, I had to stop,” she sighs.
She may have resisted, but acting permeates her DNA. Hawke is the daughter of actors Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. “They both really love what they do, but it’s a hard life. And I think, in a lot of ways, they wish for me to have chosen a more simple, more structured lifestyle,” she shrugs.
“But there’s a reason they both do it, which is they both know what’s wonderful about it. If you have the bug you have the bug, and if you’re a performer, you’re a performer. And there’s nothing you can really do about it.”