Ethan Hawke has spoken candidly about aspects of daughter Maya Hawke’s early years, admitting her childhood was “hard” in ways he still feels regret about.
Maya — known to many fans as Stranger Things character Robin Buckley — is Hawke’s eldest child from his marriage to Uma Thurman.
In a recent interview with The Times, Hawke reflected on the difficulties surrounding his split from Thurman, which was finalized in 2008. He later married Ryan Shawhughes, who had worked for the former couple as a nanny.
“The public eye is like gasoline, but what makes divorce hard is the stuff that makes it hard for everyone — the family elements, how to help the kids through it,” he said.
He went on to explain that he generally avoids discussing the breakup publicly, saying he ‘can’t really talk about this because I vowed to my kids so many times not to talk about the divorce in public’, but added that ‘one thing I will say is if you get the privilege of traveling the world, you realize that everywhere men and women have a tremendous amount of difficulty staying married’.
Speaking about moving forward after the separation, he said: “When I split up I was hellbent on not having any more kids and I wanted to be single for the rest of my life. But then I made a best friend and I liked kissing her.”
Although Hawke didn’t spell out exactly how the divorce affected Maya, he did share a memory involving concern from one of her teachers.
Hawke has long backed Maya’s creative ambitions, but during his Variety & CNN Actors on Actors conversation with Sydney Sweeney, he acknowledged there are parts of her upbringing he wishes had been different — saying there are things he regrets ‘for her’.
“I knew that she was gonna be a very good one,” he said of her career in acting. “That was her safe place, watercoloring, dancing, singing all throughout her childhood.”
“Anything that had to do with human communication was something she vibrated to,” he said. “I remember some teacher said, ‘Maya, are you happy?’ Cause they were worried about her. And she said something to the effect of, ‘Do you really think that’s the question?’
‘I thought, ‘I love this kid,’” he went on to say. “She was about 13. [Maya said] ‘I don’t think that’s a very interesting question. I think there’s a lot more interesting questions than whether I’m happy or not. Am I happy? No. But I don’t aspire to be happy.’”
Looking back, Hawke told Sweeney: “There were a lot of things about her childhood, that were really, really hard and complicated and things I regret for her.”
He didn’t specify the challenges he was referring to. However, Maya has previously shared that she’s dealt with dyslexia for much of her life.
Like both of her parents, Maya pursued acting professionally. She also left the Juilliard School in New York to take her first major role in the BBC mini-series adaptation of Little Women in 2017.
Since then, she has built a growing list of credits, including appearances in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Stranger Things, and Inside Out 2.
Despite being raised around the film and television world, Maya has said she’s tried to be careful about choosing parts — aiming to take work only when she feels she’s genuinely earned it.
She previously told Vogue: “It’s very ordinary to pursue a career that your parents do, but when it’s in the public eye it becomes a complicated thing. I am not in denial about the fact that if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be here today. I’ve thought a lot about how to deal with that, and one way was to not take any opportunity unless I was absolutely positive that I’d earned every scrap of it.”