“You’re a clown,” read a note to Maya Hawke from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson on the set of Do Revenge. 

For some actors, it might sound like an odd remark. Others might even brush it off as a joke without a second thought. But for Hawke, it opened the door to a new dimension of her craft, pushing her to embrace play and stretch her characters to their limits.

“In a kind of semi-realistic teen comedy, I found [Robinson’s] offering to sort of tap into the clown work extremely interesting and inspiring and fun and a reminder to me that you don’t have to be a French mime to use the tools of one. With every character, you really do get to explore clown work and mask work and to really play, and that note was refreshing,” Hawke explains. “So often, people just tell you to be yourself, and it was really fun working on Do Revenge with [Robinson] because she never asked me to be myself.”

In a world where everyone is constantly told to “just be yourself,” Hawke finds freedom in the opposite. That willingness to stretch and reshape herself has shaped her acting journey, including her breakout role as Robin Buckley in Stranger Things.

Introduced in Season 3, Robin quickly became a fan favourite for her wit, humour, and unflinching honesty. “I had a great acting teacher at drama school who gave me this piece of advice: don’t let your habit be your only choice,” Hawke says. “I think, a lot of the time, the Duffers wrote Robin inspired by my most nervous version of myself, which was, you know, the young woman who was on the show for the first time joining in Season 3. I was so nervous around them, and then I think they really wrote Robin inspired by that nervousness.”

But instead of feeling boxed in, Hawke saw it as a chance to grow. “I think it really allowed me to learn how I was coming off to people, and reflect on my desire to come off as less nervous. I tend to have more options in my bag of tricks than sort of just buoyant enthusiasm; I wanted to have a more grounded sense of myself and my behaviour at work, and a more diverse bag of tricks as an actor, and I really learned that through the way the Duffer brothers’ writing style works.”

As Robin evolved on screen, so did Hawke, who wasn’t afraid to throw out the script when inspiration struck. Her willingness to embrace the weird and unexpected gave Robin a life of her own, often resulting in some of the show’s most delightfully offbeat moments. One of her favourite unscripted bits came during Season 5.

“My favourite [improvised moment] that made it into the show was in Episode 5. I’m sitting in the kind of lobby area of the radio station with an ice pack over my eye. And I’m trying to explain something to Brett Gellman, his character, and in the middle of my sentence, I just stop and go hi to him,” she recalls. “I remember that on the day, I was really just trying weird stuff […] Thank you to Frank Darabont for keeping it in.”

When asked about a potential Stranger Things spinoff for Robin, Hawke’s imagination runs wild. “I’ve always thought a really fun spinoff would be her having to come back to Hawkins and become a low-level traffic officer under David Harbour. Robin and Hopper, as a duo that should never be, would be the most fun, weird duo option of different vibes,” she quips. I would love to watch Hopper be really annoyed by Robin all the time. I think they would play off each other nicely.”

This philosophy of creative play extends beyond the screen. In 2025, Hawke took a leap by making her off-Broadway debut in a revival of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice at the Signature Theatre. “I had never done a professional play before and was extremely intimidated by the task,” she admits. “I never could have imagined what a rewarding, educational, and community-building experience that would be and feel like. It’s paid off in dividends that I never would have expected.”

Now, Hawke is set to venture into The Hunger Games universe as young Wiress in the prequel The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. The character, introduced in the original trilogy as a highly intelligent yet mentally fragile District 3 victor, required Hawke to thread a delicate needle.

“The most difficult thing about playing Wiress is that the only Wiress we see in the movies is a Wiress in the aftermath of a massive plot point from Sunrise on the Reaping,” Hawke explains. “This experience during this book informs when you meet Wiress in the later films and books, and she, you know, is pretty nonverbal and really struggles to communicate—that’s the trauma response to her having been tortured at the end of Sunrise on the Reaping.”

For Hawke, the challenge lay in balancing hints of Wiress’ eventual breakdown with the woman she was before surviving the Games. “Mags and Beedee are also tortured, but don’t become nonverbal, so there has to be something about Wiress that is already dancing on the edge of the line of her mental health, where she could have such a stark, different, stronger reaction to the same experience that her friends and coworkers have,” she explains. “So, figuring out how not to foreshadow what happens to her too much, while also indicating“You’re a clown.” For Maya Hawke, those three words from director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson on the set of Do Revenge opened the door to a new dimension of her craft. why it might have happened to her in a more extreme way than her friends, was definitely the most difficult needle to thread.”

To bring Wiress to life, Hawke dug deep into the character’s backstory. “What I did to prepare was to focus on the book and think deeply about the questions I was asking about who Wiress was before this happened, and what makes her unique and special, so it was really just extrapolating from the text and moving through it that way.”

Hawke’s connection to The Hunger Games runs deeper than the role. After all, what teen born in the ‘90s didn’t go through a YA dystopian novel phase? The only difference is, Hawke never quite left hers. “I think I’m more in the YA dystopian fiction phase now than I was even as a teenager,” she reveals candidly. “But I definitely got into all The Hunger Games books as a teenager. I weirdly have really distinct memories of sitting by the window, reading them in the rain, and just loving them.”

And while most fans were busy sorting themselves into districts or factions, Hawke found a role model. “The movies held a very special place in my heart because they featured the extraordinary story of the books, while offering me a role model in Jennifer Lawrence. Her Katniss was a young woman so strong, so not vain. Her whole mission in life wasn’t about what she looked like, but about what she could do, who she was, and what mattered to her. The way in which Jennifer Lawrence played that really honoured the character in the book. She gave an extremely brave, singular performance, and that became an important guiding light for me as a young woman.”