Maya Hawke may not want to be active on social media, but producers want her to be.
The 26-year-old Stranger Things star recently confessed she “hates” Instagram and has previously considered deleting the app. However, doing so wouldn’t be good for her career in Hollywood.
“The line between actor and celebrity has gotten extremely blurry,” Hawke told Josh Horowitz on Thursday’s episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“What I always wanted to be is an actor where the work is what the draw is, not the personhood,” she said. “But the industry keeps changing, and you have to change with it and understand that all of these things are getting blurred.”
Hawke went on to explain that writers, directors, and producers are now taking social media presence into account during the casting process because they want to take advantage of their platforms, financially and otherwise. This has been extremely “difficult” for Hawke to come to terms with.
“It’s like, I don’t care about Instagram. Instagram sucks. ‘Right, but just so you know, if you have over this many followers you can get the movie funded,” she said, giving an example of something she’s been told before.
“Well, I wanna make the movie so…it’s a really confusing line to walk,” Hawke noted.
“I’ve talked to so many smart directors about how I’m gonna delete my Instagram,” she told Horowitz. “And they’re like, ‘Just so you know, when I’m casting a movie with some producers, they hand me a sheet with the amount of collective followers I have to get of the cast that I cast so if you delete your Instagram, and I lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people I need to cast around you.’”
On Instagram, Hawke has amassed over 8.9 million followers. From random pictures of buildings to screenshots of her tour schedule, the “Missing Out” artist uses her page to share moments in her life and career milestones.
Reflecting on her experience in Hollywood thus far, Hawke, the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, said she didn’t think being a “nepo baby” has benefited her career or stopped casting teams from being brutally honest.
“A director told me – actually, I think was a producer, but they were in cahoots – told me I looked prettier with my mouth closed, and that I should close my mouth after I speak more often,” she said.
Aside from acting, Hawke has spent time paving her way in the music industry, releasing her third studio album, Chaos Angel, in May of last year.
