Stranger Things: Maya Hawke (Robin) “really grateful” for her season 4 arc

Stranger Things is one of many shows delayed by the pandemic. Things are getting back on track, but it was touch and go for a while, as season 3 fan favorite Maya Hawke (Robin) remembers well. “Everyone was working so hard to be so safe and to wear masks and to protect each other and to quarantine and to do checks,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “All of that was great, but it’s such an exposed job. You’re on set and fluid has to come out of your face.”

You’ve got to cry, scream and spit, and no matter what you want, you can’t wear a mask doing that. You can’t wear a mask on camera telling a story about the ’80s. I was super intense about my quarantining and making sure I was safe and doing my testing and all of that stuff. But I wasn’t afraid for myself. I was just afraid of being on set, doing a scene with screaming and having a piece of my spit go flying. If I somehow had picked up the wrong thing at the grocery store… and I had some particle in me… I was just really scared.

Happily, Hawke found things a bit less stressful after she got vaccinated. “It took until then for it to feel totally comfortable.” Now that filming is back on, hopefully the show has processes in place to keep things running smoothly for everyone.

Robin gets a lot of development in Stranger Things season 4

As for the fourth season of the show, Hawke — who is the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman — wasn’t giving out details, but she did praise showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer to high heaven. “The Duffer brothers are just really free and really smart,” the told ET Online. “They’re not allowing themselves to get stuck. They keep changing. They keep growing. They keep investing and building the characters. It’s an honor to be a part of it, and work with them, and watch them build these people, especially Robin. … They really dig into her this season and I’m really, really grateful.”

Outside of Stranger Things, Hawke is starring in Mainstream, which is available on VOD today. She plays Frankie, a young woman who finds a path to internet stardom by making videos with a charismatic stranger played by Andrew Garfield.

It definitely sounds like a movie for our current moment, but when it comes to celebrity, Hawke prefers to let her work speak for itself. “My mom and dad and I have in common that we’re all more interested in being actors and being different people than we’re interested in being famous in the world as ourselves,” she said. “I think social media is an unbelievably useful tool to get your art out there to the world, but you’ve got to be careful with how you use it, so that you’re not putting yourself out into the world too much. And you’re putting your work, and your friends’ work, and the things you believe in out in the world without putting yourself out there.”

"I try not to read anything about myself. … It’s so scary and hard and you can get so frequently misrepresented in the things that you say. You either have to be this calculating cat that says nothing and basically just answers every question in the most boring way possible to protect yourself from being misunderstood, or you’re going to get misunderstood a lot. I don’t want to be someone who doesn’t say anything just to protect myself from the possibility of being misunderstood, but I also don’t want to watch myself get misunderstood over and over again. I just want to keep being myself and say what I think is true in the moment, in the way I want to say it, and hope that, cumulatively, my heart will come through."

We don’t have a firm release date for Stranger Things season 4 yet, but the stars seem to think it won’t be out until 2022. At least there’s a new teaser to enjoy:

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h/t Digital Spy