Maya Hawke may have famous parents with long lists of enviable credits on IMDb, but according to her dad, she didn’t care what he had to say about following in their footsteps.
“She didn’t care what I thought. There was no stopping her, and that’s the right attitude. Because if that’s the attitude you have, it actually can’t go badly. My line about it is, if your focus is what you can give the arts, you’re going to be really happy. And if your focus is what can the arts give you back, you’re going to be really unhappy,” Ethan Hawke says in a new interview with AARP’s Movies for Grownups about his daughter with Uma Thurman who hit it big with Stranger Things. “But if you really love it and you’d like to teach it and you’d like to be a part of it in any capacity, then good things happen.”
Asked whether he offered her any advice, Hawke says flatly, “Advice is useless if not asked for.” He added: “Some assistant director will be getting on our nerves and I might have a good trick for how not to let that rattle your nerves or something. But she’s the real thing. And she’s at the point now where she helps me not be stuck in the 1990s and understand how the business is working now.”
Speaking of advice, Hawke also opened up on some unsolicited advice he received from Robert Redford back in the day. “The last time I saw Robert Redford, he told me to stop wearing cowboy hats because people will think I’m losing my hair, and I thought that was really funny,” he recalled of the late legendary actor who recently passed away. “He was very helpful and kind to me when I was younger, too. He was the first real champion of Before Sunrise. A lot of people weren’t interested in that movie when it first came out, and he made us the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival [in 1995] and he introduced the film; made it seem like it was a real proper movie.”
Because the interview was for AARP, Hawke touched on aging and how he feels about his career in Hollywood at this stage. He revealed that it wasn’t until the critically acclaimed TV series The Good Lord Bird that he felt he would be able to finish his career in Hollywood, “because I was finally playing older men. If I can make this turn, there’s no turn after this. I’m going to be able to finish the race.”
The 54-year-old continued by saying that he has a “tremendous amount of gratitude” for the opportunities he’s fielded throughout his decades-long career. “But you’re never sure that they’re coming,” he added. “Sometimes people do great work that is ignored or mocked, and some people do mediocre work that is heralded and given prizes. You just don’t know. You just have to keep marching.”
He’s been marching a lot lately. Hawke is on a real spree this fall with a slew of high-profile projects hitting screens big and small. He’s receiving critical acclaim for Richard Linklater’s festival selection Blue Moon. He reprises his role as the Grabber in Scott Derrickson’s horror thriller Black Phone 2, and toplines Sterlin Harjo’s Hulu series The Lowdown.
