Why Maya Hawke Won’t Watch Pulp Fiction

Hawke’s still young, but she’s racked up a lot of high-profile roles already. Her first performance came in the BBC’s 2017 version of Little Women, and her career has done nothing but flourish since then. Her parents being Hollywood names in their own right certainly helped her along, but it’s clear she has talent.

And Hawke knew the ins and out of moviemaking from an early age. She told NME magazine in 2020, “My favorite place to be was on set, behind the camera with headphones on, watching the monitors while my mum and dad did the same scene 100 times over from different angles, just sitting and learning.”

Hawke was able to watch her dad work right up close when both of them appeared in Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird in 2021, playing father and daughter naturally. She told People magazine the following year that acting alongside one of her parents was something “we’ve been thinking about forever.”

Hawke told People that she and her father were “always working together in one way or another.” She said, “Whether it’s me calling him, being like, ‘How do I do this? I need help.’ Or him helping me with audition tapes. There’s a real network of communication there. I really see him as my teacher more than almost anything else.”

In the same interview Hawke considered what both of her parents had given her. Despite their fame, they had raised her in a relatively normal way. She said, “It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s go to this premiere!’ Both of my parents wanted to be understood by their children as people and as parents.”

Hawke went on, “I don’t think that either of my parents would be like, ‘I’m so proud of my daughter because of how good she was in this one thing, or that other thing.’ My parents are proud of me because of the way I treat my friends. My parents are proud of me because I travel alone a lot and haven’t died.”

Her mum and dad are actually divorced, but they remained friends, and that also shaped Hawke’s life to an extent. She mused in her NME interview, “There were days when things were traumatic, like when my parents went through their divorce, and having all that stuff out in public was incredibly painful.”

Having the press around often caused trouble. Hawke said, “When I was a kid, there were days when I had to put an umbrella over my head to get to the car to go to school ’cos there were paparazzi outside.” But, she went on, “I knew enough to know that and to fear it, but eventually my love overpowered my fear — I’m happiest when I get to act and play [music].”

Her mother has had similar experiences with the paparazzi. Back in 2015 Thurman went to family court over a child custody dispute with her ex-fiancé, Arpad Busson — the child in question was the then toddler-aged Luna, Hawke’s half-sister. The Kill Bill star wasn’t happy to see cameras and reporters lined up outside.

Thurman told the gathered photographers, “The press doesn’t belong in Family Court. You should respect people’s privacy. Thank you, goodbye!” But of course, the media reported on her outburst too. And ever since then it seems her difficult relationship with the press has continued, with the actress disliking them being around her.

Press intrusion was one of the main reasons Hawke’s parents wanted her to be absolutely sure she wanted to get into acting. The Stranger Things star remembered in her 2021 interview with The Guardian, “They were wary of the public life side of acting and the difficulties of that,” saying they “tried to protect” her.

But, she went on, “They wanted to ensure I had a strong enough backbone, my own passion for it and work ethic. They didn’t want to cart me along every red carpet or have me do bit-parts in their movies.” But that didn’t mean they didn’t back her ambitions; Hawke added, “Once I was old enough, and it was clear they were my choices, they were very supportive.”

She’s worked alongside her father, and also her brother Levon Thurman-Hawke, but would Hawke ever work with her mother? She told W magazine in 2021 that she believed she probably would at some point, saying, “Whether a friend or a parent, when you have that kind of intimacy with someone, turning to someone else feels like cheating.”

She also brought up the paparazzi issue again, saying, “It’s not awesome. Like, it doesn’t feel good getting mauled at the Stranger Things premiere or whatever.” But, she added, “That’s not what most of life is like. It’s like that for five minutes. And I love my work — I feel really lucky that I get to do it the way that I get to do it.”

Hawke also mused, “I still don’t feel famous. I think the benefit of growing up with famous parents is that the barometer of fame is really high.” But, she made it clear, she admired not only their acting talents but also the way they valued their work above the trappings of fame.

Thurman herself has spoken about Hawke’s journey from celebrity child to accomplished actress. She told the show Access in 2022, “I think any protective parent would be anxious for their child to sort of become… to go into public arena, not because they want to be in the public arena but because they’re so creative. I just wish they’d find any other way to be creative.”

But Thurman’s anxieties began to subside when she realized how talented and how determined her daughter was. She told the interviewer, “She’s in the end such a brilliant actress. Obviously there’s nothing else that she would have ever done… Her talent was so big. It’s what she had to do.”

Thurman’s fears are understandable, because she herself went through a lot of difficulties before she became the A-lister she is today. It was the movie Pulp Fiction that proved to be her breakthrough role, but that wasn’t an easy ride. She told Vanity Fair magazine in 2013, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the movie.”

Pulp Fiction was, after all, extremely violent and not an easy thing to film. Thurman remembered that it was “pretty frightening” and only Quentin Tarantino, the director with whom she ended up having a long working relationship, convinced her to do it. She said, “No one could believe I even hesitated in any way. Neither can I, in hindsight.”

Pulp Fiction catapulted Thurman into worldwide fame. She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Mia Wallace, and although she didn’t win, the movie is a fantastic showcase for her acting talents. It’s definitely the sort of thing you’d think an aspiring actress would want to watch — including Hawke of course.

Thurman talked about her breakthrough movie again during her keynote speech at France’s Series Mania Festival in 2019. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the scenes she found the most difficult didn’t actually involve violence. She said, “I was more afraid of the dancing than almost anything because it was exactly to my total insecurity.”

She went on, “Being big and awkward and still quite young then. But once I started dancing I didn’t wanna stop, so it was a dream come true.” But when shown other scenes from her most iconic movies, including the Tarantino ones, Thurman said, “I think it is always about dancing or fighting for your life. I got 12 shades of PTSD watching that.”

It actually came up in an interview with Another magazine that Thurman only allowed her children to watch one of her movies. That was The Producers, the remake of the Mel Brooks classic. Thurman said, “They loved it; I play the big Swedish dingbat.” But that interview was in 2008 — and now the kids are grown up.

But even now that she’s a grown adult, Hawke won’t watch Pulp Fiction, or any of her mother’s more violent movies. She has a very good reason for that, though. She told The Guardian during her 2021 interview, “Sometimes you don’t really want to watch your mom getting shot or your dad go through painful emotions, even though you know it’s pretend.”

She added, name-checking a movie her mother had once mentioned, “So mostly I only watch the happy ones. One of my favorite movies of my mom’s is The Producers, where she’s dancing around being fabulous. That’s much more fun to see than John Travolta jamming a needle into her heart.”

And yet, Pulp Fiction still plays a role in the lives of both Thurman and her daughter. In 2020 the former posted a picture on Instagram of herself giving Hawke the same haircut her character had in the movie, that iconic short black bob. She captioned it, “We are all finding our selves again.”

And for the 2022 Oscars, where she presented an award with her co-stars Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, Thurman wore a silk outfit that looked very much like Mia Wallace’s black-and-white ensemble from the movie. She even did the Pulp Fiction dance with Travolta on stage, paying tribute to the film.

All this might be a little surprising if you know about the rift between Thurman and Tarantino. In 2018 Thurman described the incident that led to them falling out: she asked for a stunt double on the set of their movie Kill Bill, and when he didn’t provide one she ended up being seriously injured.

But despite everything, they made up. A few years on from the moment that Thurman had vowed never to work with Tarantino again, she admitted she was open to rekindling their working relationship, maybe on a third Kill Bill film. And what’s more, the director said he was interested in casting Hawke as the actress’ on-screen daughter in that potential film.

Tarantino did in fact work with Hawke on another of his movies, 2019’s Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood. And the young star seemed to enjoy the experience. She told the NME in 2020, “He makes you feel like making movies is really important. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t but, when you’re on his set, it really feels like it is.”

In 2021 The Guardian asked Hawke about the Kill Bill rumors, and she said, “There are always rumors about that. Quentin is on his own darn schedule. He’ll do what he wants when he damn well wants. But I’ve known him my whole life and if he ever wanted to work with me again, of course I would love to.”

In the meantime, though, Hawke is busy with other things. Her Stranger Things character Robin has a pretty big fandom and she’s delighted about it. She told SFX magazine in 2022, “I’m really enjoying getting the opportunity to voice Robin and live in that world and be an LGBTQ character whose identity isn’t… the story that Robin gets to be a part of isn’t necessarily an LGBTQ story.”

Hawke did also mention that getting bad reviews, whether for Stranger Things or anything else, affected her, though. She said, “I try to stay out of the feedback loop as much as possible. I’m super-sensitive, and it really affects me when it’s bad. You kind of try to keep doing your work without being too influenced by whether or not people like what you’re doing.”

But no matter what the reviews are, Hawke always has her mother to support her. She told Nylon magazine in 2020, “My mom understands in a different way from my dad how difficult [the acting industry] is,” and some of that had to do with Thurman’s experiences as a woman in Hollywood.

Hawke said, “Because this industry is so much tougher on women, my mom had reservations about me not becoming an actor, but becoming a public figure. The emphasis that the business puts on your appearance, the emphasis the business puts on your age — on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with your ability to act.”

But the advice Thurman gave her was invaluable. It was, Hawke said, to “make the choices you want to make. And that you follow your gut and your instinct and the projects that mean something to you, and that you don’t get trapped in the starlet tornado. That you don’t value about yourself the things that the business tells you.”

Hawke also mentioned in the interview how privileged she was to have famous parents. She said, “I’m well aware that every part I get is somehow influenced by the history of who I am as a person and where I come from. I’m a not-that-famous, not-that-successful young actress, but if I get cast in something, it will get PR.”

She went on, “From a producer’s point of view, that’s a huge advantage. Which gives me a massive leg up. It was a massive leg up in getting an agent and a manager. All these sorts of extra things that people don’t think about when they think of people getting roles.”

Hawke concluded. “My upbringing plays a part in all those interactions, all those moments, all that reasoning. I will get the opportunities I get. I will try as hard as I can to be brilliant in them. And if I suck enough, I’ll stop getting chances.” But that’s probably not going to happen soon — and perhaps she’ll finally watch Pulp Fiction before long.