Maya Hawke on nepotism, take two

Maya Hawke recently made some candid remarks about being a nepo baby and media outlets have been having a field day with her comments. In an interview with The Times, she acknowledged that being the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke has come with some advantages, to say the least. While some of the headlines for articles recapping her interview appear to have really sensationalized her interview, highlighting only the most arrogant-sounding and clickbaity parts of the conversation, there’s some nuance in what she’s saying that’s certainly worth discussing, like her mention of whether she “deserves” her success. 

“‘Deserves’ is a complicated word,” she said during the interview. “There are so many people who deserve to have this kind of life who don’t, but I think I’m comfortable with not deserving it and doing it anyway. And I know that my not doing it wouldn’t help anyone.”

Maya described having two choices – the first being to change her name, get a nose job and go to open casting roles, the second was to embrace her nepotism, even if it meant being mocked or made fun of.

“It’s okay to be made fun of when you’re in rarefied air. It’s a lucky place to be,” she said. “My relationships with my parents are really honest and positive, and that supersedes anything anyone can say about it.”

Given all the conversation around nepotism and nepo babies in the last two years, it’s ballsy thing to say. And despite the fact that I don’t have a history of being entirely in support of white women flaunting their privilege, I was surprised that her honesty didn’t bother me. 

During the interview, she reflected on her 2019 chat with The Hollywood Reporter, where she found herself in hot water after giving off the impression that she auditioned, in the same way normal, non-nepo babies do, with solely her skills landing her the role she had in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. When in fact, she had auditioned in her room, alongside her dad, and got the call from Quentin Tarantino shortly after.

“I’ve been wildly made fun of for this clip when I said, on the red carpet, that I auditioned. I never meant to imply that I didn’t get the part for nepotistic reasons — I think I totally did”. 

So many celebrities have given us their hot takes on nepotism in recent years. And while a lot of takes have been awful, others have been kind of refreshing. Well, as refreshing as a take on nepotism can be. And what makes a take on nepotism good, anyway? A few things, but namely honesty, self-awareness and accountability. 

To a certain extent, these things were lacking when stars like Kate Hudson and Jamie Lee Curtis spoke about the fame and success that runs rampant in their families. While Kate played it safe, saying that her family is a “storytelling family” and that it’s “definitely in our blood”, Jamie Lee felt the need to end her lengthy Instagram post in which she addressed the ongoing conversations surrounding nepotism by defending her and other nepo babies’ “right to exist”. 

Despite the world not being exactly where it is today at the time she said this, it was still two years after George Floyd’s murder and massive social justice movements highlighting the very real threat that inequality, racism and police brutality posed to people that don’t exactly look like Jamie. To be clear, those are literal threats against someone existing, which pale in comparison to the imagined threat of people simply acknowledging that you had some luck in the family department. 

It’s this kind of disconnect that makes nepotism the contentious topic that it is. The self-centredness of wanting so desperately to prove that you are worthy of your success and that you worked hard for it that you attribute more effort to making those things known than you do exercising the true power of your privilege, which can come in the form of simply acknowledging it and calling out the unevenness of the playing field, or taking it a step further by mentoring others or giving them a helping hand in some other way. 

Zoe Kravitz spoke to GQ about this idea of proving her worth, expressing her insecurity in working in entertainment. Again, we see her leaning into that same “family business” narrative we heard from Kate and Jamie Lee.

“It’s completely normal for people to be in the family business,” she told the outlet. “It’s literally where last names came from. You were a blacksmith if your family was, like, the Black family.”

I love me some Zoe. But being a blacksmith back in the Middle Ages - where, what the f-ck else was there to do? - isn’t really the same thing as having an advantage over a lot of your peers due to the success and connections your immediate family members have already amassed in the very competitive and political Hollywood landscape. But I also think she’s onto something about there being a certain “family business” aspect to all of this. And I think that’s exactly where the danger of too much nepotism lies. 

Are we robbing ourselves of a diverse talent and celebrity pool, and not in a way that necessarily pertains to racism, though it certainly is part of the conversation, but in a sense that more and more, celebrity culture is becoming an increasingly exclusive, members-only club that you can only get into if you pass the DNA test? Furthermore, with the bar getting higher and higher each year on “getting in”, what, who, are we missing out on because people weren’t the nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers or children of the “right” people?

That was a question that came up recently when North West got to perform alongside a star-studded cast in a stage production of The Lion King at the Hollywood Bowl. When clips of her performance were posted online, people suggested her performance was lackluster, given the significance of the role.

One of the louder voices in that conversation was a mother who felt her daughter lost out to North, not for a lack of talent, but over a lack of connections. Her video on TikTok, explaining how far her daughter, who is no stranger to Broadway, made it in the audition process only to be beat out by North West in the final round racked up over 30 million views. 

To me, this, and other situations like it (read: college admissions scandal), is a far cry from Maya, who, back in February, professed her gratitude for growing up in the world she did, despite wanting to believe that she ‘would have found a way to be an artist even if [she’d] been adopted’ during a conversation with The Guardian, which leads me to my next thought.

How do we distinguish the nepo babies who deserve success from the ones that don’t? What does it even look like to make that assessment? Because I think the reason I’m not upset with Maya is that I do feel like, despite the tone of her remarks and her saying she is undeserving, that she is. I think she’s grateful and aware of how her upbringing and family allowed her to maximize her success. And she knows she’s lucky. And unlike what we saw, or rather, didn’t see with Kate and Jamie Lee, and perhaps even Zoe, is that it takes a lot of courage to chalk work that she trained hard for in school, with dyslexia, up to being a nepo baby and to refer to herself as ‘undeserving’. 

Both Lainey and Sarah have crowned Allison Williams the queen of the nepo discussion – and rightfully so. Because Allison properly called out what distinguishes a nepo baby from one with self-awareness – the need for some acknowledgement of your privilege. 

There’s one more nepo baby take that bears repeating, particularly because every nepo baby I’ve mentioned in this piece is a woman – making me question my own role in the discourse about nepotism and whether we’re more likely to question a woman’s pipeline to success than we are a man’s. And it’s Lily Allen’s. 

“I feel like a lot of the time over the past 15, 20 years when I’ve been written about, it will always say, ‘Lily Allen, daughter of Keith Allen,’ and I don’t see that happening with boys as often as it does with girls,” she said in an episode of her podcast, Miss Me, last month.

Much like Sarah pointed out last week in her piece about M. Night Shyamalan’s daughters joining the nepo baby train, all people are expecting is some acknowledgement. All we want from the Mayas, the Kates, the Jamie Lees, the Shyamalan girls and all of the men with famous dads, uncles, grandparents and godparents alike, is to hear you say that some how, some way, you benefitted from being born into the families that you were. And the fact that Maya is doing just that is alright by me.