Get to Know Maya Hawke, Your New Stranger Things Obsession

(Spoilers ahead!) 

The Stranger Things crew got a little bit bigger this season.

As Steve (Joe Keery) took a new job at Scoops Ahoy, an ice cream shop inside Starcourt Mall, he gained a reluctant friend in Robin (Maya Hawke), his seemingly only coworker who was also a former high school classmate of his. 

At first, she made a whole lot of fun of Steve, keeping track of every time he struck out with a girl and teasing him for how many child friends he has. Then, she found out that Steve and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) were trying to translate and decode a secret Russian message, and she unwittingly signed on for an adventure that took the group underground into a secret Russian base, where the military was trying to reopen the gate to the Upside Down, a thing which she had never heard of. 

At the end of the season, as Robin and Steve were recovering from truth serum, they finally had some real (if high) conversations, and Robin revealed that she had been obsessed with Steve, but not in the same way other girls were. She was actually jealous of him, because he had the attention of the girl she had a crush on. Steve took two seconds to process this, then started teasing her for having a crush on an aspiring singer with such a terrible singing voice. 

The season ended with Robin convincing the guy at the video store to give both her and Steve a new job, because Steve will attract all the ladies (and Scoops Ahoy is no more), and now we’re very much looking forward to a potential season four featuring Steve and Robin as wingmen renting movies. 

Robin fit into the show perfectly, and Maya Hawke makes a fitting addition to the cast for multiple reasons. 

First of all, her parents are Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, both of whom started appearing in Hollywood in the mid-’80s. Ethan Hawke went on to star alongside his daughter’s eventual costar Winona Ryder in 1994’s Reality Bites. Coincidentally, Maya’s first role was Little Women‘s Jo March in a TV miniseries, the same role Ryder played in the 1994 movie.

Maya told us that her parents were big fans of Stranger Things, and that they even beat her to it. 

“They were fans of the show even before I was actually,” she said. “they were like watching, they’re like Maya, you have to watch the show. I was like, OK, I’m really busy, but then I watched it.” 

By the time she scored an audition, she was a big fan. 

Per her Instagram, the almost-21 year-old Maya is also a singer and songwriter and performs the occasional show. She started her career in modeling, partly as a way to not have to ask her parents for money, Ethan told us in 2016. She attended Juilliard to study acting, but dropped out in order to take the role of Jo in the Masterpiece miniseries of Little Women, which aired in December 2017.

You can hear more from Maya and her Stranger Things costars in the videos above!

Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.

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