The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘I think I scare men’
Hardly surprising given Maya Hawke’s parents are Hollywood royalty and she’s on the cusp of stardom herself. Jane Mulkerrins meets her.
As she makes her acting debut in the BBC’S new adaptation of Little Women, Uma Thurman’s daughter Maya Hawke talks to Jane Mulkerrins
‘BOTH OF MY PARENTS think being a professional child actor is poisonous,’ Maya Hawke is telling me, with an expression that strongly suggests she shares their disdain. ‘They came to my plays, read the poems I wrote and would listen to me sing, but they kept me out of the spotlight. They were cautious about public exposure while you’re very young.’
Her parents would know: her father, the actor Ethan Hawke, made his film debut aged 15 in Explorers, alongside the late River Phoenix, while her mother, Uma Thurman, also began working at 15, first as a model, then an actress; one of her first movies was the multi-oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons.
And although their eldest daughter, now an impressively well-adjusted 19-year-old, doesn’t really seem the sort to court the spotlight, it may well soon be thrust upon her regardless as she makes her professional acting debut later this month in BBC Christmas drama Little Women.
The three-part serial, based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, has been adapted by Call the Midwife’s Heidi Thomas, and also stars Emily Watson, Michael Gambon and Angela Lansbury.
But the plum role, that of feisty, strong-willed tomboy Jo March, belongs to newcomer Hawke,
whose determination to secure the part would no doubt have made her alter ego proud. ‘Jo was a literary heroine of mine, especially when I was struggling with my dyslexia growing up,’ nods Hawke. ‘Her ambition, courage and drive to overcome her obstacles really inspired me. And I always related to her clumsiness, her curiosity, her stubbornness, her always putting her foot in her mouth. When I heard the BBC was making Little Women, I rushed to audition.’
The similarities between actor and fictitious character are impossible to deny. During our time together, Hawke is energetic and engaged, with fervent opinions and observations tumbling out in a great, unstoppable torrent. And there’s an unselfconscious tomboy element, too; she’s beautiful, but wears it so lightly you almost (almost) don’t notice.
Though written in 1868 and set in the American Civil War, Alcott’s tale of the four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – feels highly relevant today, with America bitterly divided and gender roles and dynamics being challenged and re-evaluated. ‘It’s a different time, but there are explorations of sex, love, creativity and ambition. Those are all very current and familiar themes – in my life, at least,’ agrees Hawke.
We’re in a makeshift nook in the corner of a photography studio on the west side of Manhattan, where Hawke has spent the afternoon being shot for this magazine. Long-limbed, with blue eyes and freckles, it’s not hard to see why she was selected as the face of high-street brand All Saints for its spring/summer 2017 collection. So closely does she resemble her parents, it’s almost disconcerting; one second she is a teen incarnation of Uma, the next, pure Ethan.
Post-shoot, she’s changed into a short black velvet dress and dark-red patent heels, but, much to my amusement, won’t tell me who they are by.
‘This isn’t how I normally dress. I’m going to a birthday party, so I’m kind of dressed up,’ she insists. ‘These are my mum’s clothes – I stole them. And I don’t want to be written about as this girl who’s wearing this ridiculously expensive outfit.’
Hawke’s everyday style is more what she describes as ‘an attempt at a contemporary Annie Hall. Jeans, a tight, stripy T-shirt and a cool jean jacket’. She breaks off to eat some roasted vegetables with her fingers. ‘I do care a lot about what I wear, but in a way that is about comfort and practicality, and I always want to look like me.’
In the weeks before we meet, Hollywood has been in meltdown as a seemingly endless list of powerful men have been accused of sexual misconduct and abuse, including the hotelier André Balazs, whom her mother dated for three years. At first, Thurman said she was ‘waiting to feel less angry’ before making a statement. But then, a week after this interview, she posted an image of herself in Kill Bill: Volume 2 (a film in which she played a woman who takes bloodthirsty revenge against her mortal enemy) on Instagram, declaring: ‘I am grateful today, to be alive, for all those I love, and for all those who have the courage to stand up for others… Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey [ Weinstein], and all your wicked conspirators – I’m glad it’s going slowly – you don’t deserve a bullet.)’ The message ended with the words ‘stay tuned’ and included the #metoo hashtag, implying Thurman has also been a victim of sexual abuse.
‘I’ve made a very educated decision about going into the industry,’ says her daughter. ‘I know what I’m getting into and I was raised to be very strong-willed and outspoken, and to not take shit from anybody. I feel very lucky, with everything my mother’s generation went through and all the generations before, that right as I am having my debut, people are being held accountable for their actions. A certain sexuality involved in the power dynamic is being slowly cleansed from this industry.’
‘I was raised to be very strong-willed and outspoken, and to not take shit from anybody’
Hawke was born in New York, two months after her parents married, and a little over a year after they met on the set of the sci-fi film Gattaca in 1997. Her brother, Levon, was born in 2002, but Thurman and Hawke separated a year later, when Maya was five.
She grew up between her mother’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and her father’s
in Brooklyn. ‘There are things that are hard about coming from a divorced family, but having two houses is not one of those things. It’s about the dynamic,’ she says, sagely.
Her father went on to marry the family’s former nanny, Ryan Shawhughes, with whom he has two daughters, Clementine, nine, and Indiana, six, while Thurman was twice engaged to French financier Arpad Busson, with whom she has fiveyear-old daughter Luna, before the couple finally broke up in 2014. In January this year, Thurman and Busson became embroiled in a vicious custody battle over Luna, which saw him accuse his former partner of having mental-health issues, and medicating with prescription drugs and alcohol. Thurman eventually won primary custody.
Though Hawke, like Jo, has three sisters, she says the large age difference renders their relationships free of the rivalry that Little Women depicts between the Marches. ‘I’m really more of an aunt to them,’ she explains. ‘I feel a responsibility to be present in their life, and to show them a healthy way to grow up in the world that I grew up in. I made a ton of mistakes, but I still have all my 10 fingers and toes, and a sturdy clean nose.’ She grins. ‘And I made my mistakes out of the spotlight; I hope they will be able to as well.’
Her dyslexia, however, was more challenging than the potential pitfalls of being born into fame. ‘I went from school to school to school, looking for the right place for me,’ she recalls. Eventually, she found Saint Ann’s, the bohemian, artsfocused school in Brooklyn Heights, whose former pupils include Lena Dunham, Jemima Kirke, Zac Posen and Jean-michel Basquiat. With fees up to $42,000 a year (Basquiat won a scholarship there aged seven), students are encouraged to express themselves creatively and work is not graded. Encouraged by the freestyle environment, Hawke developed a passion for drama. ‘Acting is like the blood of language,’ she declares.
After Saint Ann’s, she won a place at another prestigious New York establishment, the performing arts school Juilliard, whose notable alumni include Jessica Chastain, Oscar Isaac, Christopher Reeve and many more.
But, this summer, she was forced to choose between taking the role in Little Women and returning for her second year of college. ‘Juilliard has a zero-tolerance policy for absences due to work,’ she explains. ‘I only would have missed five days, and I wrote them a really nice letter asking them please to take me back, but I was ready to accept the repercussions of my choice.
‘I wanted to be independent. I wanted my own apartment and job, and I wanted to move on to the next chapter of what my life was going to be.’ She doesn’t think that comes from nowhere. ‘Both my parents were supporting themselves when they were 15. There’s something scrappy in all of us.’ Beyond Little Women, she is looking at ‘film and theatre primarily. I’m interested in television in short stints, but if I wanted to do the same thing every day I would have picked a different job.’
Hawke has nothing else booked in, but recently spent a fortnight going to auditions and meetings in Los Angeles. ‘I felt totally castrated by the fact that I had to drive everywhere,’ she laments. ‘For me, the subway system in New York stands for independence.’
I ask if she’s dating anyone. ‘No,’ she replies, with a small sigh. ‘I had a wonderful, loving relationship that lasted a year. It just ended and I’m single.’ She puts her hand to her eyes, and, for just a brief second, slightly loses her self-possession. ‘I think I scare men,’ she confesses. ‘I was given the impression that being 19 and single in the world means you’ll be fending off the wolves, but I can’t find a wolf to save my life.’
Unlike most of her peers, she refuses to engage with dating apps to remedy this. ‘I’m not particularly interested in my phone,’ she shrugs; there is a private Instagram account only for friends. ‘I’m interested in human contact. I think phones have created a certain social incapacity; it’s made people socially deficient. And if it’s fun to spend time alone, then there’s not the incentive to go out and meet people and make yourself vulnerable.’
And with that parting observation, Hawke heads out to go apartment-hunting, see a play and then hit a party.
Little Women will air on BBC One this Christmas
‘I’m not particularly interested in my phone. I’m interested in human contact’