Maya Hawke does not have an office, but there is a spot three blocks from her apartment that does the trick. On a sunny winter’s day in New York’s West Village, the actor and musician is tucked into the nook of a cosy restaurant with a modish menu and a rustic patina. The place exudes studied nonchalance, but Hawke strikes me as less quiet luxury and more of a thrift store magpie; her hair is braided in plaits, and she wears a few fine necklaces that she absently toys with while chatting. Her baggy navy jumper was knitted by her mum. “I’m not very fancy,” she says, pulling at her top. “You’re seeing me as me right now.”
Hawke’s rise as an actor has been defined by well-chosen roles, assured performances and a taste for the kind of auteurish film-makers favoured by her parents, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. “Oh, Maya Hawke is in this?” is practically a meme thanks to her small but memorable parts as a fleet-footed Manson disciple in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, a daffy dancing-school mistress in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and, as Leonard Bernstein’s daughter in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. And then there is the not-so-small: her breakout role in Netflix’s cultural juggernaut Stranger Things.
Today Hawke is keen to talk about something even closer to her heart: her career as a wry yet touching indie folk artist. Her two well-received albums to date, Blush and Moss, were steeped in a love of the singer-songwriters Fiona Apple, Leonard Cohen and Bright Eyes. Due out in May, her new album Chaos Angel is her best yet, sharpening her storytelling amid a tapestry of teasing electronics, muscular guitars and heavy reverb. “Normally [in the time] between when you make a record and when you put out a record, you start to hate it,” she says with a grin. “This is the first time that hasn’t happened to me.”
Angels have been on her mind today, too. This morning, Hawke, 25, has been wandering the New York streets in feathered wings for this feature’s photoshoot, which is partly inspired by a shot by the late Peter Lindbergh. “It’s just so gorgeous,” she enthuses, pulling up the photo on her phone. “I love it.” As it happens, her first-ever professional photo shoot was with Lindbergh. “My mom was shooting with him, and I was doing my first auditions for the 2014 Sofia Coppola Little Mermaid film that never happened, but I needed a headshot,” she says. “So my mom let me pop into her photo shoot and have a picture taken with him.”
Getting a free shoot with one of the world’s most famous fashion photographers is not something that most of us could ever fathom, but Hawke wears her privilege with a shrug; you feel that she is simply at ease with her unusual life and its inherent advantages. When I note that Hawke speaks about her parents quite freely, she rolls her eyes: “Well, they’re my family.” (Not every scion has the same nonchalance: when Dear Evan Hansen star Ben Platt was asked about being namechecked in New York magazine’s Nepo Baby cover by Rolling Stone last year, his team shut the interview down.)
When asked about nepotism on the Today show recently, Ethan Hawke dismissed it as “the history of mankind”, adding: “‘The apple doesn’t fall from far from the tree’ is a very old expression.”, Maya has a diplomatic point of view on the debate. “The only thing that bums me out about it is when it becomes the headline,” she says. “But I also know that some day it won’t be. I deal with the pain of having it be the most important thing by believing that I haven’t yet earned it to not be.”
Hawke stars in Wildcat, a biopic of the writer Flannery O’Connor that is directed by her dad, a film she says she worked on “in my head for five or 10 years”. Reviews have been mixed, but she doesn’t seem to have any desire to bury the film, explaining its treatment of the racism present in some of O’Connor’s work in detail before apologising for her “convoluted and deeply loopy response”.
“I think you probably can tell that I love this work and I’m so grateful to be getting to do it,” she adds. “I can believe anything I want to believe about me having found a way to be an artist even if I’d been adopted. But I don’t know – I’m so grateful for the world I grew up around, for the New York City theatre scene I was raised in, getting to go see plays and sit backstage, and to know about great directors and how I wanted to be.”
She says her upbringing was “rooted in poetry, and a constant conversation about what it means to make art”. Yesterday, Hawke received a phone call from her father “philosophising” about art and life. “It [was] about responding to when things get positive attention that are not your favourite things you’ve ever done, and your favourite things don’t get that much attention,” she says. “How do you not follow the bad wolf that leads you towards being likable? How do you stay true to yourself?”
An individualistic streak surges through Chaos Angel, where the poetry of 70s folk rock is orbited by modern sounds – a vocodered sea shanty here, impudent brass toots there and an occasional beat switch that suggests the entire mixing desk has been plunged underwater. The record is produced by frequent Phoebe Bridgers collaborator Christian Lee Hutson, who is also Hawke’s boyfriend. Did they get together while making the record? “Not exactly,” she says. “It’s not a secret, but I think it’s a very odd thing about modern pop culture that people that have been dating for two weeks talk about their relationship to the public. It’s a bit unhinged.”
Chaos Angel is a little off the rails itself with its spectrum of sounds enlivened by a performer’s knack for personae. During recording sessions, Hawke tried her hand at different characters, like “whispery depressive” and “pop maniac”. A song titled Okay is a quietly devastating exploration of codependency inspired by Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. At other times, Hawke’s airy, sure voice needs little else: the opener, Black Ice, recalls the hushed longing of cult songwriters such as Linda Perhacs or Kath Bloom. Talking about her new music gets her fired up. “I’m more excited to put this record out than I’ve been about anything in my life,” Hawke says decisively. “I think you have to narrow down your audience as a creative. If you’re trying to make art for everybody, you’re gonna make bad, neutral art.”
Growing up in New York, Hawke lived between her parents’ New York homes after they split when she was five. While her mother listened to pop radio in the car, her father’s CD collection was packed with Willie Nelson, Wilco and Patti Smith. It wasn’t uncommon for dad and daughter to write poetry, paint and play guitar together well into the night. Still, she was a kid growing up in the 00s. At nine, she saw her first concert. “Hannah Montana meets Miley Cyrus,” Hawke recalls. “She did half the show in the blond wig and half without.”
Art was an escape. “I had gone through my own kind of academic trauma,” Hawke says. “I was really dyslexic, and I got moved around a lot.” She finally made it to the art-leaning Saint Ann’s, a private school in Brooklyn. She liked it there but was “scared” to apply to Ivy League colleges. She did submit an application to an elite university, in the form of Vassar, but took its rejection hard. “I kind of had this mother wound feeling like I wasn’t smart enough,” she says.
When her younger brother Levon got into Brown University, Hawke tagged along for a semester. She went to parties, got drunk, snuck into classes on philosophy and the history of Hinduism, and felt she was finally experiencing a part of her youth that she had sidestepped with her acting work. But the japes of that period nearly ended in disaster. During one weekend at Thurman’s house in upstate New York, they stumbled on hot coals, thoughtlessly dumped in dry leaves. “It was licking at the sides of our mother’s old wooden farmhouse,” says Hawke. “It would have gone up like a tinderbox. It was really intense. And we may or may not have been on hallucinogenic mushrooms.” The experience shaped Chaos Angel’s lead single Missing Out, where she sings, to spectral indie rock: “I was left like coals in leaves / And I sparked up in winter’s breeze”.
Her Stranger Things co-stars became something like classmates, though, and a few are particular friends: Charlie Heaton has come to a Hawke gig; she and Sadie Sink are “very close”; and she’s been to see Finn Wolfhard play live with his alternative rock band Calpurnia. She’s a hoot in the Netflix show as the likable, sometimes acerbic Robin Buckley, a gay teen whose ice-cream-sundae-slinging job at the mall is interrupted by the important business of slaying supernatural villains. “I’m excited to graduate,” she says of the show’s final season, which she’ll leave to shoot in a couple of weeks. “It will be very sad when it ends, but I’ll be done playing a high schooler and enter into my own womanhood, and I’m excited about that, too.”
With that new chapter beckoning, Hawke’s taking the time to consider what she wants her work to stand for. As our plates are cleared, her mind flickers back to yesterday’s conversation with her father, where they pondered whether the search for external validation was a false god. For a moment she seems in awe that she is able to talk about this kind of thing at all. “Even to get to have all these conversations about what it is to be an artist and what is the good wolf and what’s the bad wolf?” She smiles. “That’s so lucky.”
Chaos Angel is out on Mom+Pop Records on 31 May.
