Maya Hawke fully and humorously embraces her status as “nepo-baby”

“Merit is a complex word… (…) But I accept the idea of not deserving it, but of doing it anyway.”

When you are the girl by Uma Thurman And Ethan Hawke, it's hard to escape the correlation between his film roles – Asteroid City (Wes Anderson) and Maestro (Bradley Cooper) – and his status as “nepo-baby”. Many of them are not always comfortable talking about it, because they quickly become subject to criticism claiming that their name is an effective tool in the star system to easily land roles without going through auditions where a hundred young, unknown talents compete. But not Maya Hawke.

Interviewed by The Timesthe interpreter of Robin in Stranger Things declared that he fully assumed his status. When the journalist asked her if she felt she deserved the opportunities presented to her, she replied:

“Merit is a complicated word… there are plenty of people who deserve to have this life and who don’t, but I accept the idea of not deserving it but doing it anyway. “

She added that she had the choice between “change (your) name, get a nose job and go to auditions” or seize the chance she had to be born into this small world of artists. She ended up opting for the second option. A completely accepted choice and one that she always evokes with humor, like in September 2023 when she considers her family as “the Kardashians, but independent and boring version.”

In this same interview given to Variety on the occasion of Wildcat, a film directed by Ethan Hawke and in which plays father and daughter, the actor of Circle of Dead Poets also spoke out about their nepotism: “If someone wants to criticize us about it, that's fine. Everyone has their own opinion. We're just trying to do a good job.”

Ethan Hawke: “I'm a nepo dad, and I'm not ashamed of it”

Do a good job, for “nepo-baby”, it would be an obligation. If the criticism targets the ease of obtaining a role, the first concerned evoke the pressure to do well. As Gwynneth Paltrow, daughter of actress Blythe Dranner and director and producer Bruce Paltrow who declared on Hailey Bieber's show (herself an heir to the Baldwin family) in 2022:

“I think once you're in, and you get in unfairly, you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good. Because people will be willing to put you down and tell you that you're not cut out to be here, and you're only here because of your father or mother, or something like that.”

Returning to his participation in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino, as one of the daughters of the Manson family, Maya Hawke assured that she got the role thanks to her family connections and she doesn't hide it:

“I was made fun of a lot for this video taken on the red carpet in which I explain that I auditioned. (editor’s note: she auditioned well). I didn't want to imply that I didn't get the role for reasons of nepotism – on the contrary, I think that's the case.”

Benefiting from her status, the actress nevertheless knew how to prove that she was devoted to art and loved acting as much as composing so much so that she would always have found a way to become an artist. Nepotism or not.

After starring alongside his mother in The Kill Room, Maya Hawke will play Billy Wilder's friend while he was filming Fedora in the adaptation of the novel Wilder & Me. She will obviously return in season 5 of Stranger Things, currently being produced at Netflix, and she released her latest album last Friday, Chaos Angel.