This past week, she appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast with Josh Horowitz and shared how, one time, a producer told her she should close her mouth when she’s not talking to “look prettier.”
“A director told me — actually, I think it was a producer, but they were in cahoots — told me that I looked prettier with my mouth closed and that I should close my mouth after I speak more often,” Maya said.
Maya, 26, explained that facial expressions are a key part of her performance style and that she uses them in different ways to convey a character’s emotions. “I do often let my mouth hang open,” she said, “but depending on what character I’m playing, because I feel like jaw tension and mouth tension is so important to express what kind of person you are.”
“I was really upset about being told that I should close my mouth more to look prettier, because I was playing a character that was distinctly unselfconscious,” she shared.
“That was a trait of the character, that they didn’t care about looking pretty and they were unselfconscious,” Maya said. “So it was clearly just a desire of the aesthetic of the thing, and I was annoyed about it.”
While Maya didn’t reveal the name of the project, she’s been in stuff like Little Women, Stranger Things, Inside Out 2, and Asteroid City. She didn’t disclose the producer’s name either but said she definitely spoke up for herself at the time.