Category: Interviews

“To Love a Boy” & “Stay Open” Singles Out Now + “To Love a Boy” Music Video

Check out Maya’s two singles “To Love a Boy” and “Stay Open”, as well as the music video for “To Love a Boy”. Maya has such a beautiful & lovely voice! I can’t wait to hear more of her music.

Actor Maya Hawke (“Stranger Things,” Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) has shared a music video for her new song “To Love a Boy.” The visual features Hawke as a mermaid, seeking a man she can love as much as the sea.

“To Love a Boy” is the A-side from Hawke’s recently released debut single. Both “To Love a Boy”and the B-side “Stay Open” were written and recorded by Hawke and Jesse Harris (who has written for Lana Del Rey and Norah Jones, among others). You can hear Hawke’s “Stay Open” below.

Speaking with Pitchfork, Maya Hawke said of “To Love a Boy”:

After seeing the movie Call Me by Your Name for the second time, I left the theater and I was walking home to my apartment in Brooklyn, and I just started thinking about the images of water and the romantic feeling in that movie. I was just filled with this intense jealousy and desire be in love and feel that way. Then I wrote the lyrics to “To Love a Boy” as a poem, and I sent them to Jesse Harris, and he wrote that melody, and I loved it. It’s about this dream reality where you could love somebody in an all-consuming way, where it feels like when you’re swimming in the ocean on a hot summer day.

When I was brainstorming about the video, I started thinking about a mermaid coming ashore and wanting to love a boy as much as she loved the ocean. Then I decided the video would be more interesting if the love interest of the video was the ocean, and it was about her pursuit to get back to the ocean. I’m a professional actor, but I’m not a professional musician, so I wanted to do the whole thing really not professionally. So I spent all my own money to make the video and I had to rent the mermaid costume, which ended up being incredibly shitty, but in a way that I think is really funny.

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Who What Wear – Get to Know Maya Hawke

In the first moments of the highly anticipated third season of Stranger Things, things already look different. For one, half of the scenes take place at the shiny new Starcourt Mall, where teens run off to spend their allowances on ’80s wares, movie tickets, and ice cream cones. But the mall isn’t the only new thing in town. Behind the counter at Scoops Ahoy is Hawkins newcomer Robin, the unaffected cool girl played by Maya Hawke. Her part in Stranger Things is nothing short of a breakout role for the budding 21-year-old actress. But this isn’t your typical Hollywood-starlet-rises-to-fame-out-of-nowhere narrative, because there’s one minor detail about Maya that differentiates her: She’s the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke.

We may live in an age when having famous parents earns you the world without needing to lift a finger, but Hawke is out to make a name for herself as an actress. Since pulling herself out of Juilliard’s acting program in order to dive headfirst into a full-time career, she’s been trying on all sorts of roles for size—everything from period pieces (her on-screen debut was on BBC’s TV adaptation of Little Women) to Hollywood blockbusters (catch her as a member of the Manson crew in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) to her latest project, Ladyworld, an indie horror film out this month. Hawke is hungry to try it all.

Chatting with her, it’s not hard to see how her parents and their considerable careers rubbed off on Hawke. As we settled into a quiet corner on the set of our Who What Wear shoot in Los Angeles, she was all focus, delivering her replies in earnest but also peppering the conversation with bits of her dry humor. Post-shoot, she re-emerged in a relaxed checkered suit and retro sneakers, admitting that she’s currently embracing a ’70s English teacher aesthetic. (Trust me. It’s working for her.) If being on a Hollywood set is like “one big classroom,” as she told me, then it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that her parents and peers are her teachers, and school is officially in session.

What was it like joining the cast for season three of Stranger Things?

It was super overwhelming, but the minute I got there, everyone was really kind and welcoming and made me feel right at home. I expected it to be really scary, and I was scared, but everyone got rid of my nerves right away. They were so inclusive and collaborative.

Who did you feel closest to out of the cast?

Maybe Priah. I mean the whole Scoop Troop were my homies. They were amazing. So talented, so fun to work with. So they definitely were my closest people on set. And the Duffer Brothers, actually, are the people I really got the most personally close to throughout shooting it.

What was the most significant thing you learned from working on the set of Stranger Things?

I’d never done anything action before. I think I learned how to maneuver that kind of environment and how to sort of keep being yourself and keep acting through, you know, running away from Russians. Like how do you stay in character when you’re under attack? And so that was an interesting learning experience, but also it’s all about hours on set in terms of learning how to be a good film actor. Learning from costume, learning from camera, learning and asking questions. You know, it’s a big classroom if you let it be.

If season four is confirmed, what would you hope for Robin?

I have total faith in the Duffer Brothers, whatever they think is right. I hope she gets to explore the environment of the video store. I think that’s a really rich environment, and I hope that she just gets to keep growing as a person and developing.

Moving onto your upcoming movie, Ladyworld, what drew you to that script initially?

It just sounded really interesting and different. [The director] Amanda Kramer sent the script, which was rich and complicated and had beautiful scenes and ensemble moments. One thing as an actor I love is I love ensemble acting. I love a scene that has like 10 people in it, and we’re all moving through the space. I think that’s where some of the richest dynamics come into play.

She also wrote an amazing letter with the script about what she wanted to do with the movie and what she thought it meant. It was really inspiring to me. In the arts, I want to help people who are really passionate and creative actualize their dream in any way I can. So, you know, I was offered to be in that, and she had a clear passionate dream, and I wanted to make it come true. If she wanted me there, I wanted to be there.

You’ve been in a variety of projects, both TV and film, both indie and more blockbuster. Is there a type of role that excites you most, or are you kind of testing it all out?

I just want to work with people who love what they do. I want to work on projects that are being made for a reason and being made by people who are passionate about them because that’s the only way to make anything good, is if everyone involved with it loves it. Continue reading Who What Wear – Get to Know Maya Hawke

WSJ Feature & Interview

Contains spoilers for Stranger Things season three.

Even though Maya Hawke couldn’t read a full script for the third season of Stranger Things before accepting the role of Robin, she knew she wanted it. The story was still being written when she auditioned, but she liked that Robin seemed independent, strong-willed and above all else, funny. Though 21-year-old Hawke has acted for almost her whole life, she’d never really gotten to play a funny character, she says—not even in school plays.

“In the beginning, Robin’s really dry and sarcastic and tough, and I’m not,” Hawke says. “I’m really excitable and hyper and warm, especially on set.” Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of the Netflix show, had an idea of who Robin was but, as Hawke explains, the character evolved as the season progressed, becoming more and more like the actress in real life.

Some reviewers immediatelyhailed her as the breakout star of the new season following its premiere earlier this month. In addition to critical praise for her portrayal of cool, smart Robin, she received many appreciative tweets for playing a queer character on screen, while a BuzzFeed story pointed out how closely she resembles both of her famous parents, Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. Last week, she made her big screen debut in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, playing a drifting ’60s flower child. Her own fanbase has appeared virtually overnight—from five hundred thousand Instagram followers ahead of the July 4th premiere of Stranger Things to, currently, over two million.

In the Stranger Things world of small town Hawkins, Indiana, Hawke’s character Robin works with Steve (played by Joe Keery) at Scoops Ahoy, the ice cream shop in the shiny-new Starcourt Mall’s food court. The two have a bantering, sometimes acrimonious relationship at first. When things once again go terribly wrong in Hawkins, Robin and Steve are part of the “Scoops Troops” quartet alongside the younger kids Dustin (played by Gaten Matarazzo) and Erica (Priah Ferguson), fighting Russians who have an underground command center beneath the mall. She and Keery’s character bond when they’re imprisoned by the Russians. They escape while high on truth serum, their antics making for some of the season’s funniest scenes. “Joe is one of those actors who walks into a room and immediately sees all the things in the room that could be funny,” says Hawke. “That’s a really exciting person to work with, to bounce off of that.”

For much of the season, it seemed like Steve had finally found a romantic interest in Robin, who could both handily make fun of him and translate Russian communications with impressive speed. But when he tries to tell her as much, she surprises him by coming out. “Throughout filming, we started to feel like she and Joe shouldn’t get together, and that she’s gay,” says Hawke. “Even when I go back and watch earlier episodes, it just seems like the most obvious decision ever.”

For someone spending her 21st birthday cooped up in an interview, Hawke is cheerily untroubled—and barefoot, having unbuckled her white patent sandals and curled her feet under her, chatting about how she’s already celebrated while swiveling around in an office chair. “I was in upstate New York, which is where I grew up [spending] weekends, and I had six or seven friends out at my house out there with my mom,” she says. “We just cooked dinner from food we grow out in the garden.”

Her slight flower-child persona is in evidence at work, too; she walked into the premiere of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood last week in a full gilded flower crown, having played a hippie-ish Charles Manson follower who’s having a moral reckoning. The film is a retelling of the 1969 murders through the eyes of Sharon Tate’s fictitious neighbor, a Hollywood has-been played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his stunt double/handler/friend (Brad Pitt). “No one gets to make a movie the way Quentin gets to,” Hawke says. “We did the scenes a hundred times in different ways and shot it from every possible angle and it was really freeing and fun and playful and we pulled [four] all-nighters or something exhausting like that.”

Her voice drops to an almost-growl when she describes working with the famously challenging director, who’s known her since she was two years old. “To me, the way he pushes just feels like joy and love of the movie business and relishing in the opportunity to get another take. He loves the movies so much, and he wants you to be so good in it,” she says. “And if you do something he likes, he fucking loves it, you know?”

Her mom Uma Thurman is perhaps best known for her roles in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2. Last year, Thurman accused Tarantino of pressuring her into driving an unsafe car, in place of her stunt double, while filming the latter, which resulted in multiple injuries and permanent neck pain. She said a few months later that she’d consider working with him again, though. For his part, Tarantino said getting Thurman to do the stunt was the “greatest regret of his life.” (Thurman did not return a request for comment.)

Hawke says she’s close with both of her famous parents. “I’m always running decisions by them,” she says. “They both have similar levels of success but really different experiences within the business. I think that’s the biggest advantage [I have], that I have information about the pitfalls and the good things. Hopefully it’ll keep me from making some mistakes that young actors can make.”

After performing in school plays and summer camps while growing up, Hawke realized she wanted to go into acting professionally during her junior year of high school. Applying to college made her really unhappy, the opposite of how she felt doing school plays. She started applying to acting conservatories, got into Julliard and attended for a year before dropping out to play Jo March in the BBC’s three-part Little Women series.

The series, also starring Emily Watson, Angela Lansbury and Kathryn Newton, was her first screen role, and Jo is in almost every scene. Every day was like a new acting class for Hawke, a “crash course,” where she did five or six scenes. “I’ve loved Little Women since I was a little girl. I always struggled with reading and writing but I loved storytelling,” she says, “and Jo’s storytelling drive was inspiring to me, and her work ethic was inspiring to me, and I loved her. I fell in love with her. I’ve always wanted to play her. And now it seems like they make fricking Little Women every other year, but I didn’t know that that opportunity would ever come around again, and I had to take it.”

Still, the decision to leave Juilliard wasn’t completely straightforward. “The most drastic thing about dropping out, or even deciding to go to an acting conservatory, is that you’re losing touch with your generation,” she says. “People in your generation are going to college, and you’re not. And so, how do you stay connected to your generation? How do you feel its heartbeat within you?”

To do that, she likes working on projects with friends, like writing music and lyrics and directing music videos. She loves doing her own writing, too, and reading, noting how important her self-education is to her. She says she feels lucky to come into acting at the same time as others she grew up with in the city who are “doing great right now,” like her friends Lucas Hedges and Fred Hechinger, as well as those she didn’t know like Timothée Chalamet and Ansel Elgort. “Even the people you don’t know that well, it somehow makes you feel less alone,” she says.

Not that being alone is so bad. “I have more money, so I don’t have to ask my parents for it anymore. That’s amazing,” she says of standing newly on her own, before pausing. “Yeah, let me go back in time and not sound like I just saw that in print and wanted to throw up,” she deadpans. “Let’s put it this way: I have a lot more independence and freedom. And I really think that nothing improves your relationships more than independence. The less you need from anyone, the more you can really see them and get along and love each other. And so, that’s been the biggest change probably—is that freedom creates possibilities.”

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Live with Kelly & Ryan

Yesterday Maya was on Live with Kelly & Ryan – her first talk show appearance ever! Check out the full interview below! The gallery has also been updated with captures of her from the interview.




Gallery Link:
0158 x Interviews & Other Screen Captures > 2019 > Live with Kelly & Ryan – 07.29.19