Part of Stranger Things featuring Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, and Gaten Matarazzo.
Rise to Fame
She got kicked out of school for not being able to read, and now she's in everything. Dyslexia shuffled her through schools until Saint Ann's in Brooklyn, an arts-focused place that doesn't give grades, let her stop failing on paper and start performing. She dropped out of Juilliard after one year to play Jo March in the BBC's Little Women, a role she's said meant something personal because the novel was one of the first books she finished on her own. Stranger Things season three had a snarky Scoops Ahoy coworker who wasn't supposed to be the breakout, Steve Harrington's foil. Hawke turned that supporting gig into the fan favorite of the season and suddenly wasn't just Ethan and Uma's kid anymore.
In the Spotlight
Inside Out 2 grossed $1.69 billion worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing animated films ever, and Hawke's jittery Anxiety became the character people quoted for months. It's the kind of breakout that rewrites a resume. Three albums into a folk-adjacent music career, she released Chaos Angel in 2024 to strong reviews. The acting and the music were supposed to compete for credibility; they don't anymore.
Side Notes
In a 2020 NPR interview, she pushed back when the host said she 'suffered' from dyslexia: 'I wouldn't say suffer. It's one of the great blessings of my life.' She described getting dropped into lower reading groups every year, the bullying, and then the way it made her more determined to love stories. Her grandmother is Baroness Nena von Schlebrugge, a Swedish-German model, and her grandfather is Robert Thurman, the Buddhist scholar. The lineage reads like a novelist's invention, but the part that actually shaped her career was the learning disability, not the famous parents.