The song Maya Hawke wishes she’d written: “I related to it so profoundly”
Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re not into Stranger Things by now, there’s not much hope for you, honestly. It’s nigh-on impossible to avoid it for one thing, but for another, it’s simply the best put together, coolest, most inventive show that’s been on TV in decades. And it has an amazing soundtrack. And it’s full of cool young stars like Maya Hawke. What more do you want?
As the fifth season drops and blazes its way across the internet with people desperately trying to work out what’s going on both upside and downside in Hawkins, Indiana, it’s well worth doing what I did recently and going right back to the very first season to catch up on where it all started, 2016 in fact, when all the actors were much smaller and we hadn’t even thought about the song ‘Running Up That Hill’ by Kate Bush in ages.
It’s a reminder not just of how well written the show is in terms of plot lines and character development but also that we’ve come a long way with this cast, through Covid-19 and the cost of living and various wars, but as with the best 1980s movies that are so inspirational for the show, the likes of Mike, Will, Max and Eleven are always there getting up to adventures as soon as the big red Netflix logo arrives on the telly.
Maya Hawke didn’t come along until the third season in 2019, but quickly became a favourite as Robin, working alongside Steve in the ice cream parlour that would prove so pivotal come the conclusion of that year’s story arc. Now we may as well get the nepo stuff out of the way. Yes, she’s the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, so once she decided to be an actor, it probably wasn’t that hard to get a foot in the door.
But it’s what you do with opportunities that count, and she showed she had considerable talent, firstly in a BBC production of Little Women, then a bit part in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, before she landed her role on the Duffer Brothers’ spooky series. She’s since been in Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and got her first Wes Anderson film under her belt with Asteroid City, plus voiced a character in a Pixar film, which is a lot of boxes ticked before 30.
But it’s not just acting that she does, her sideline as a musician has also gone swimmingly, in 2019 she released her first two singles and in the five following years put out three albums, Blush, Moss and Chaos Angel. Hawke has spoken at length about how she was influenced by folk music and solo female performers, enjoying artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. But another singer who rose to fame in the ‘90s has proved another inspiration.
She told Flaunt: “Fiona Apple is another big one for me. She’s so inventive, and when I hear her observations about the world, I’m always like ‘Fuck!’ When I listened to her song ‘Under the Table’ from her new record, I related to it so profoundly that I wished I could have dragged it out of my stomach as my own. I feel what she’s saying so much, and it’s so specific and so true.”
New York-born Apple was another singer who found fame at a very early age, her debut album, Tidal, in 1996 was a massive hit and went triple platinum in America when she was just 19. ‘Under the Table’ is from her 2020 album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, which marked just her third album in 20 years.
Hawke, meanwhile, has also agreed to play a major part in the next Hunger Games instalment, Sunrise on the Reaping, which is due for release in 2026.
