Let your friends borrow the things you care about most
Let your friends borrow the things you care about most
Maya Hawke on going "actor mode" with fits, safeguarding Ayo Edebiri's sick First Reformed hat, making new music, being generous with blessed jawns & more
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— Jonah & Erin
Maya Hawke — she acts in cool things and she makes cool music! Back in 2019 Quentin Tarantino cast her in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which is when we first saw her, playing one of the Manson Family in a sneakily comedic cameo opposite Austin Butler… Since then she’s worked with Wes Anderson on Asteroid City, Sofia Coppola on a Calvin Klein campaign, Bradley Cooper on Maestro, and her father Ethan on a few things, including his excellent 2022 documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, The Last Movie Stars, and his upcoming Flannery O’Connor biopic, Wildcat, which she helped bring to life…
She’s also put out two albums of wry, lovelorn, hushed indie folk called Blush and Moss, she’s toured with likeminded musicians like Faye Webster and Bright Eyes…
… and to round it out??
She has been known to look mad cool in clothes and get off fits on stage & off with assured, understated panache !!
So the other day, I (Erin) was excited to hop on a SpyVideo Call with Maya … We talked about getting over your self-doubt when it comes to making art; what all great directors have in common; going “actor mode” to rock clothes outside yr comfort zone; seemingly but not actually stealing Ayo Edibiri’s rare First Reformed cap; sharing an enchanted jawn with friends instead of hoarding its blessed energies; and more unbeatable topics.
Blackbird Spyplane: The strike just ended, shout out to the beautiful things that happen when workers come together and withhold their labor from these goons & fatcats. How did you spend the time?
Maya Hawke: “Right before the writers’ strike I was about to start shooting the final season of Stranger Things, so with that on hold I got to really focus on music, and on my writing. Also I just took a little break. And the first couple months were like, Phew, I needed this, and then it was, like, Oh no — what do I do? But I got the chance to work on music for my next album, and think about videos and art and all this stuff that I never really had this kind of time to dedicate myself to.”
Blackbird Spyplane: I’m stoked for that, and I’m stoked for Wildcat, where you play Flannery O’Connor. She’s one of my favorite writers and I know you’ve loved her for a long time — when someone asks you where to start with her, what do you tell them?
Maya Hawke: “So the movie is based on A Prayer Journal, and I always recommend starting with that, moving into her stories, and then into her novels. She wrote the journal when she was much younger, and it’s straight from the heart, really confessional, very direct. Because some of her prose can be difficult to penetrate — it can have this slightly Joycean quality of feeling like puzzles you need to put together, and you’re moved but you don’t necessarily know why. I love that, but it’s not where I tell people to start. I love “Good Country People” and “Parker’s Back” — those are probably my two favorites, both of which are in Wildcat. Really, I recommend anyone who wants to get into Flannery O’Connor watch our movie, haha.”
Blackbird Spyplane: This is anecdotal but I feel like a bunch of people I know who went on to make art all had Flannery periods when they were younger.
Maya Hawke: “I read A Prayer Journal when I was a teenager, because I was so excited about art and life and writing and going to the theater and wanting to be a part of that world, but I also had so much self-doubt and insecurity about whether or not I could even attempt to coexist with all the great work I was witnessing.
“Reading her journal and seeing someone who became this canonical American writer also experience self-doubt was moving to me. She talks about, you know, ‘God please let me be as good as Nietzsche, but please don’t let me suffer as much as him. I want to be really good but I don’t want to suffer. Do I have to suffer to be good? Is the thing standing in my way between being good the desire to be good?’ That stuck with me. I think that’s true. If you sit down, like, ‘I wanna write a good song,’ you’re definitely not going to write a good song. But if you sit down and say I’m just going to write a song about this sprig of lavender, then you might write a good song.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The first thing Jonah and I saw you in was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which we just rewatched and which remains incredible. It’s funny, you show up in this weird comedic moment at the end, right as the tension is building up, and then you SKEDADDLE before things go insane. You’ve worked with a bunch of great directors — Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola… Is there something you’ve noticed people working at that level all have in common?
Maya Hawke: “Everyone does it different, but the commonality between the great people I’ve worked with, whether it’s the ones you mentioned or my dad, the Duffer brothers, or Bradley Cooper, is a full-hearted belief in the dream: ‘This is important.’ The minute you know a film is going to go badly is if the director is, like, ‘I don’t know, I guess we can figure it out, let’s just shoot it.’ Obviously it’s just a movie, but for it to be great you need someone at the helm who’s like, ‘I live or die on this project, and it means so much to me, and every second matters.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: I love that idea of full commitment to the dream.
Maya Hawke: “You know that thing about how people will describe their dreams to you, and it’s always boring? You ignore them, like, ‘OK, whatever, don’t near to hear about this, dude.’ A director needs to be someone who can tell you about their dream and it’s interesting. Someone who can tell you about something no one should have any good reason to care about, and they make you care about it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Wow, very well put. Switching gears, Prada dresses you for a ton of events, you rocked a very cool Schiaparelli denim set at Cannes — it seems fun, but I wonder if it’s at all weird to have other people dress you, especially in hella over-the-top fancy s**t you’ve never rocked before? It feels like the risk of “the clothes wearing you” is so much higher, and there’s a hundred cameras documenting it…
Maya Hawke: “It’s funny, in regular life I kind of just wear stripey shirts, high-waisted jeans, black turtlenecks, colorful socks, and Mary Janes. So I used to really dread red carpet events and getting my picture taken in a fancy outfit and all that, until I started treating it like, ‘You’re just playing a character.’ Like tomorrow I’m going to a Dior Christmas party thing and I went in to try on the outfit they want me to wear and I was, like, ‘OK I’m playing this person named Veronica, she’s the classic Love Actually character of the receptionist who’s in love with her boss, she scowls at his wife when she comes in to ask him for lunch, like, “Um, he’s not available right now.” She has brown hair and wears it in a ponytail.’ And now that I’m going to the party as Veronica I’m excited. I’ve switched the game on myself and started treating fashion like an actor.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s tight — Method dressing. Also, I noticed the very tight First Reformed cap (below) you wore to Telluride. We’re big Paul Schrader Hive here. What’s the story, is that a wrap gift you got from your dad?
Maya Hawke: “No, that cap actually is a name-droppy story but not the name drop you might think. I was at a bar in London and Ayo Edebiri — we’re new friends — was at the bar and I was, like, That’s such a cool cap. She said, ‘I know, I’m a collector of merch, I’m rich in merch.’ But later I asked my dad about it and he was, like, ‘That must have been a prop from the movie, they made them for the church souvenir shop, I have no idea how she got that...’”
Blackbird Spyplane: What! That’s sick.
Maya Hawke: “So I don’t know how she got her hands on this hat, but she forgot it at the bar and I took it, and I’ve been wearing it…”
Blackbird Spyplane: What I’m hearing is you stole a grail-tier jawn from Ayo!!
Maya Hawke: “Haha, I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to give it back.” [Editor’s note: Turns out A24 sold these, too, which may be how Ayo copped.]
Blackbird Spyplane: Speaking of jawn-theft, both your parents spent the ‘90s getting off some tremendous fits. What have you stolen from their closets?
Maya Hawke: “Both my parents? My dad? Are you sure??”
Blackbird Spyplane: Of course! He rocked a d*mn beret & killed it, are you kidding me? Don’t roast papa like that!!
Maya Hawke: “No, you’re right, but I feel like he’s been wearing the same thing since the ‘90s. He’s still rocking his matching corduroy suits, his baggy pants with the ketchup stain, his cowboy chic. I think his style has significantly improved lately, actually. But yeah I’ve gotten some great vintage t-shirts from my dad, and I’ve gotten a ridiculous amount of stuff from my mom. She calls me the kleptomaniac — sweaters, socks, pajama bottoms, the most tremendous collections of winter coats possible... I can’t help myself. The really nice s**t I give back.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Finally, I asked you to share a unique possession with Spy Nation, and you sent in a gold medallion inset with what look like rubies or garnets in a cross… What is this amulet?
Maya Hawke: “It’s a Celtic cross that a friend of my mom’s gave to her when I was like 11 or 12, and when I saw it I freaked out — like, ‘Is that a magical talisman?’ I was obsessed with magic and I had this running theory that I could actually do magic and cast spells. So I had a kleptomaniac freakout and took it from her. To this day, any time I’m going to something that makes me nervous I wear it. It has that memory of the immediate magic I saw in it as a kid and also the magic of many, many wears.
“For friends of mine, too, if they have some stressful thing on the horizon, I’ll slip it on their chain.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s beautiful — some people might hold on tight to something that meaningful, but you pass it around and let friends enjoy the energy… There’s a powerful lesson there: Don’t hoard the jawns you care about most, share them with people you care about too!
Maya Hawke: “Yeah — I like to just send it off with friends for a while.”
Maya Hawke is on IG here and you can find her music here.
The Global Intel Travel Chat Room is here, featuring earth-spanning GOAT-locale recommendations.
Peep our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of gems in the comments.
Our Profound Essays, Mindsets and “Unbeatably Spicy Takes” are here.
Great as always guys! Keep up the good work! 🫡
Great interview—and reminded me of my teenage Flannery phase when I would drive down to the library during summers off from school, read like 2 stories at a time, then put the book back on the shelf until next time 😌