Maya Ray Thurman Hawke was born on 8 July 1998 in New York City, the daughter of the actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, who separated when she was six. She grew up in Manhattan, attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, and has spoken openly about the dyslexia that shaped her schooling.

One point needs settling before any arithmetic. Her parents are wealthy and famous, and none of that is hers. Nothing in this profile counts a parent’s fee, royalty or property; the figure at the end is built only from money she has been paid for her own work.

She modelled first: the face of the British retailer AllSaints for the 2016-17 collection, editorial in Vogue, and in 2017 a Calvin Klein underwear film directed by Sofia Coppola. Campaign work at that level pays $40,000 to $120,000 a booking, so our estimate for her modelling years is $100,000 to $300,000.

She then spent a year at the Juilliard School before leaving to take the part of Jo March in the BBC’s three-part Little Women, broadcast at the end of 2017 and carried in the United States by GBH. A lead in a prestige British mini-series pays a newcomer $8,000 to $20,000 an episode: call it $30,000 to $60,000 for the job.

Robin Buckley, the ice-cream parlour clerk who arrives in season three of Stranger Things in 2019, is the part that made her. She was recurring in that season and a series regular afterwards, and the show’s pay structure is unusually well documented. When Netflix renegotiated for the final season it split twenty regulars into four tiers, as Puck first reported and Consequence set out: Winona Ryder and David Harbour at $9.5 million each, the five original child actors at just over $7 million, and a third tier of Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery and Hawke at over $6 million apiece.

Season five runs to eight episodes, per Netflix, so her tier-three deal works out at roughly $750,000 an episode – against the $25,000 an episode the original children were paid in season one, a comparison NME drew when the figures emerged. Seasons three and four came before that renegotiation; at $30,000 to $60,000 an episode as a new recurring player and $100,000 to $200,000 as an established regular, our estimate puts those two runs at $1.1 million to $2.7 million. Stranger Things alone has therefore paid her somewhere between $7.1 million and $8.7 million gross.

The film work has been chosen rather than accumulated. Quentin Tarantino cast her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019; she led Netflix’s Do Revenge in 2022, appeared in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro in 2023, and played Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat, which her father directed and on which she produced. In 2024 she voiced Anxiety in Inside Out 2.

On the going rates for those billings – a supporting part in a studio feature at $75,000 to $250,000, a streaming lead at $500,000 to $1 million, an ensemble role for a director who pays close to scale at $60,000 to $150,000, and a principal voice in a major animation at $300,000 to $800,000 – our estimate for everything outside Stranger Things is $1.3 million to $3 million gross across 2019 to 2026.

Robin Buckley was written as a one-season addition and became one of the show’s most popular characters, which is the practical reason Hawke moved from recurring to regular and then into the third pay tier. She has shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild ensemble nominations, and Wildcat took her onto the festival circuit as a producer as well as a lead.

Her second career has had its own reception: Exclaim! called her third album the work of a songwriter growing into the form rather than an actor’s side project, which is the distinction that decides whether music earns anything at all.

Fashion has been the constant. The AllSaints campaign came before she had a screen credit, the Coppola-directed Calvin Klein film came the same year as Little Women, and WWD reported her return to Calvin Klein for the brand’s underwear campaign alongside the footballer Romelu Lukaku once Stranger Things had made her a global name.

A fashion campaign for a talent of her visibility pays $150,000 to $400,000 a year for an ongoing face deal and $50,000 to $150,000 for a single season. Across a decade of that work our estimate is $700,000 to $1.8 million gross – the second-largest earning line she has, and the one most sensitive to how long each contract actually ran.

The music is the venture. She has released three albums through Mom + Pop Music – Blush in 2020, Moss in 2022 and Chaos Angel in 2024, the last of them pressed and distributed internationally by independents including Rough Trade – and has toured each of them in clubs and theatres rather than arenas.

An independent-label artist at that scale keeps a far larger share of a far smaller gross than a major-label signing. Allowing for modest advances, streaming and physical sales, publishing on songs she writes herself, and club touring that roughly washes its own face, our estimate for her music income across 2020 to 2026 is $150,000 to $500,000.

She has stayed a New Yorker through the Stranger Things years rather than moving to Los Angeles, and for a 28-year-old whose largest cheque cleared in the last two years the property question is mostly about timing. Our estimate of her housing equity, net of mortgage, is $300,000 to $1.2 million.

Her other assets are the ones her contracts create: residuals across six seasons of streaming television, the writer’s share of three albums of her own songs, and a producing participation in Wildcat. None of her parents’ property, royalties or holdings is counted here, and no inheritance is assumed.