Uma Thurman has passed down many lessons to her daughter Maya Hawke — and some are quite mystical.
“My mother really taught me to love and respect nature and to, like, love gardening and being in nature and to love thinking about, like, herbal remedies to things,” Hawke, 27, said on the Thursday, June 4, episode of NPR’s “Wild Card” podcast. “Like, you know, you get a cold, and she would make me a pineapple skin tea because the pineapple [has] enzymes in the pineapple skin are good for getting rid of your cold. It’s stuff like that that’s just sort of, like, witch-adjacent.”
She continued, “You know, like, slightly [witchy]. We’re not bubbling over it.”
Thurman, 56, shares Maya and son Levon, 24, with ex-husband Ethan Hawke. (Thurman and Hawke, 55, each have younger children from other relationships.)
According to Maya, her family witchcraft practices are nothing stereotypical.
“It’s not, you know, toil and trouble,” the Stranger Things alum quipped. “[It’s not] something that could potentially get you burned at the stake, but that really is just light Wiccanry.”
Wicca is a non-Pagan religion heavily inspired by extinct pre-Christian European religious practices. Members often practice witchcraft in groups known as covens.
As for her dad, Maya believes Ethan is “magic in a different way.”
“I wouldn’t say he’s witchy, but he used to do, like, treasure hunts and scavenger hunts for me as a kid where he’d write little notes and, like, paint a map on a watercolor and cut it up,” Maya recalled on Thursday. “He’s, like, crafty and magical, but he’s not witchy.”
Maya Hawke opened up about her relationship with father Ethan Hawke — and what it was like to follow in her famous family’s footsteps. “We’re like boring, indie Kardashians,” Maya, 25, joked about her relatives in a Variety interview with Ethan, 52, published on Tuesday, September 5. Maya is the oldest child of the Dead […]
For the blended Thurman-Hawke brood, witchcraft is primarily focused on embracing nature.
“My mom is extremely, like, nature-focused, and she’s a gorgeous gardener,” Maya told NPR. “Even a part of not knowing what my parents’ deal was professionally was because most of the time I spent with my mother, she was barefoot in our garden on her knees, like, picking stinging nettles to make soups out of, which is also another incredible herbal remedy for what ails you.”
According to Maya, she has a particular affinity for nettle soup.
“It’s my favorite soup, and it’s so hard to get stinging nettles, and you can only get them, like, really this time of year,” she explained to the outlet. “The only place in [New York City] that they sell them is Union Square farmers market. They’re, like, at no grocery stores. They’re amazing and so good for you. You have to blanch them first to get rid of the stinging part, but it’s a witchiness [and] a kind of witchy love of nature and a love of herbal remedies and kind of different sorts of medicines for what ails you.”
