Maya Hawke’s four favourite childhood movies: “I couldn’t watch that enough times”
As far as nepo babies go, Maya Hawke has been a pretty welcome addition to the Hollywood community.
It might be because her mother and father are two of the coolest actors in the entire game, or maybe it’s because she’s actually a pretty good actor in her own right. Either way, Hawke has scored quite the following off her own back, not just with her acting projects but in the entire game of music, too.
Of course, Hawke’s main claim to fame was playing the queer matriarch Robin Buckley in the Duffer brothers’ Netflix horror series Stranger Things, a role in which she proved that she was just as emotionally adept and creatively nuanced as her parents. Of course, this was always going to be a difficult manoeuvre, and Hawke herself was well aware of how much she’d have to fight to establish herself as a major player all on her own.
As she previously reflected to Rolling Stone, “I feel like the only way to handle the nepotism thing — which definitely gives you massive advantages in this life — is, you will get chances for free, but the chances will not be infinite; so you have to keep working and do a good job. If you do a bad job, the chances will stop. That’s my ethos.”
The truth is, Hawke always had it in her to become a star. Obviously, being the child of two major names helps a lot, but Hawke already had the passion for storytelling in her as a child, and carried many of her favourites with her into adulthood, specifically when it came to stepping into others’ shoes herself and bringing other types of stories to life.
When you look at the broad scope of Hollywood names, it’s often difficult to figure out what influences them to do what they do. Of course, there’s always an innate love for everything cinema there, just as most of them enjoy the challenges that come with trying to convey things they might have never experienced or seen before.
Often, however, you find out everything you need to know by scratching just a little deeper beneath the surface and digging into their favourite movies. They say you can tell a lot about a person from the movies they cherish, and with actors, it often reveals more about their approaches and why they opt to chase certain projects and opportunities over others.
Hawke is no exception. Obviously, Stranger Things is different from a lot of Hawke’s childhood favourites, but much of the emotive core she found in her four favourite films ended up bleeding into her mindset as an actor in a general sense. During an interview in which a handful of the show’s actors revealed their top films, Hawke’s choices were pretty revealing: she chose The Incredibles, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, and Robin Hood.
Elaborating on her choices, she described Willy Wonka as the “perfect film” and all the reasons why Fantastic Mr Fox stayed with her long after the credits rolled. “I couldn’t watch that movie enough times,” she said. “Between the incredible work of the actual creations and the story, it’s just the perfect movie.”
