Ethan Hawke and his daughter, Maya Hawke, sat down with Variety to discuss everything from nepotism in Hollywood to their new movie, Wildcat. But the biggest standout from the interview was Maya's charming and hilarious roast of her father.
Maya, 25, did her best impersonation of her 52-year-old dad attempting to use FaceTime. Apparently, Ethan tends to shout when the phone is held away from his ear.
In the clip, which has since gone viral on TikTok, the Stranger Things actor holds out a whiteboard to simulate a phone and shouts, "Hey, guys! Hey! So I can't believe you can hear me from all the way in New York!"
"That's true," a blushing Ethan says with a laugh. "That's really where I show my age, I think, the most."
"But you don't do it on the phone," Maya adds. "On the phone, you're like, 'I understand this machine.'"
@varietymagazine #MayaHawke does an impression of her father, EthanHawke, trying to use FaceTime.
The interview is full of classic father-daughter anecdotes. Maya recalls how she experimented with calling her father "Ethan" to sound more professional on set. "And then I realized it was actually more distracting to people," she says. "They'd be like, 'Why are you doing that?' So I mostly called him 'Dad.'"
Gen Z "it" girl Maya is famously a spitting image of her parents, Ethan and Uma Thurman, who met on the set of 1997's dystopian sci-fi thriller Gattaca and had two kids before divorcing in 2005. And Ethan has been a mainstay of ambitious, arthouse cinema since the '90s. "We're like the boring, indie Kardashians," Maya jokes.
Wildcat, which premiered at the 50th Telluride Film Festival on September 1, is a biographical drama film about American novelist Flannery O'Connor (portrayed by Maya) struggling to publish her first novel. Her father co-wrote and directed the project, which was born from Maya's longtime fascination with the Southern Gothic writer.
While the collaboration has, of course, spurred complaints of nepotism from internet commentators, Ethan is insistent that the project was all his daughter's idea.
"Put simply, I'm a nepo dad!" Ethan jokes. "And I'm not embarrassed about it."
"I had moments of insecurity about it while we were shooting the movie," admits Maya, who was also a producer. "But the internet doesn't have a lot of nuances. My dad has been a massive teacher for me, and we want to work together. We like being with each other."
Ethan adds, "If someone wants to criticize us for working together, that's totally fair. You have to let people have their opinion. You just have to try to do a good job when you're onstage."
