Actress and musician Maya Hawke, the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, has shared the relatable wish that she — and every ’90s/’00s kid with divorced parents — had growing up: to get her folks back together à la The Parent Trap.
In a conversation on The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast, Maya told host Anna Martin how she felt as a child during the split of her extremely famous parents in 2003.
On the podcast, the Stranger Things actress shared a reading of an excerpt from Jordana Jacobs essay “Our Kinder, Gentler, Nobody-Moves-Out Divorce” which she said helped her break the illusion of love, and face how hard relationships are.
“My parents got divorced when I was a kid, and I am under no illusions. Or I’m under slightly fewer illusions,” Maya told Martin.
In the early 2000s when they split, Ethan Hawke was an established actor from Dead Poets Society (also the “Fortnight” music video with Taylor Swift), and Uma Thurman was a household name for her starring roles in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. Maya was five-years-old.
Martin later asked Maya if she wished her parents had done something different during their separation, such as ending the marriage but still living together for the sake of Maya and her younger brother Levon.
“I think the dream situation is captured by the film [The] Parent Trap,” responded Maya.
Nothing could be more iconic than the Lindsay Lohan 1998 classic family comedy, in which two young girls discover they are long-lost twins — both played by Lohan, because why bother paying two child actors when you could just make one do twice the work? — who conspire to get their separated parents back together.
If you were a kid who had split parents after this banger came out, you 100% wished for a secret twin at least once in your childhood. No exceptions, and that includes Maya Hawke.
“Yeah, secret twin, get your parents back together,” Maya yearned.
“I remember so many hard days and fights about packing your bag, and you forgot this medicine, and you have to go back and get it, and Sunday goodbyes. And then the whole day is gone because it’s all a transition day, where everyone is in strife.”
As any child of divorce knows, regardless of how famous your parents are, the constant moving and transitions suck. It introduces a young person to a much bigger world, sometimes earlier than they were ready for it — as Maya recalls a conversation she had with her dad in her youth.
“I remember this funny conversation that I had with my dad where I wanted to go to a party with my friends. And he was like, ‘But this is our weekend. This is our special time. This is our one weekend,’” Maya recalled.
“And I was like, ‘Every weekend can’t be special. They’re all my weekends. And you get every other one, and my mom gets every other one. And I know that that’s hard.’
“This seems like a better way of being less possessive over your child and allowing your child to have some more consistency and normalcy in their life.”
As much as Maya may have wanted to arrange a Parent Trap scenario, she did not. Ethan Hawke later married nanny Ryan Shawhughes in 2008, and Thurman married and separated from French investor Arpad Busson.
Her secret twin (played by Lindsay Lohan) was never found.
