‘Stranger Things’ Actress Maya Hawke On Becoming The Show’s Breakout Star And That Great Big Twist

SPOILER ALERT: A warning for anyone who has yet to watch the latest season of “Stranger Things” that some key plot points will be revealed.

Maya Hawke is earning well-deserved accolades for her performance as Steve’s (Joe Keery) sassy Scoops Ahoy co-worker, Robin, on “Stranger Things 3”, and the 21-year-old actress opens up to Glamour about her breakout role.

“I was so scared of the fact that ‘Stranger Things’ has such a wide audience that I’ve tried to duck out of paying attention to people’s reactions,” says Hawke, the daughter of actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Her dad gave her a shoutout on Instagram the day “Stranger Things 3” hit Netflix.

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Some of you may have missed her in last year’s BBC production of Little Women. Some of you may have missed her work at Juilliard. I know many missed out on numerous high school productions — heck I even missed a few and I’m her father. Some of you may know her music, some may not. But Ladies & Gentleman, get to know MAYA HAWKE. She’s the real thing. #StrangerThings

A post shared by Ethan Hawke (@ethanhawke) on Jul 5, 2019 at 6:06pm PDT

“The chance of people hating me in that show was just as high as people liking me in it, so I just thought I didn’t need to receive the ego boost or the ego destruction,” she adds.

In the season’s big twist, Robin dashes Steve’s expectations of a budding romance by revealing she’s gay, and Hawke recalls having many discussions with “Stranger Things” showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer about keeping that moment authentic.

“We were trying to decide if that was the right thing for her, if it was natural, if it felt like who she was supposed to be. We just wanted to make sure nothing about it was forced,” she explains. “You know, there’s probably not a lot of people coming out in high school in Indiana in the 1980s. I think the reason she comes out is because she loves Steve and wants him to understand why she has to reject him and doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. It’s to preserve their friendship, and I think she wants to be her whole self with him.”

As the child of two successful stars, Hawke insists her intent in taking on the role wasn’t to put herself on Hollywood’s radar, but simply because she loved the character.

“It wasn’t a vehicle to stardom,” she insists. “That part of it was never interesting to me — if anything, it was overwhelming, scary and a deterrent.”