Over breakfast of poached eggs in TriBeCa, Maya Hawke is recalling a recent conversation with a friend about something she’s rarely experienced — catcalling, or random men yelling out comments about her looks as she walks down the street.

“It’s a terrible experience for so many people and it shouldn’t happen. But I was commenting on the fact that I don’t feel like I get looked at on the street,” said the actress. I was, like, ‘It never happens to me. Why doesn’t it happen to me? Is it because I dress like a farmer?’?”

Her friend had another perspective, said Hawke, who is the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman: “My friend was, like, ‘No. You’ve just been having people look at you your whole life. So you don’t even see it happening.’ I was, like, ‘Oh that’s so true.’ I’ve become a little immune to the gazes of strangers because it’s been a part of my life for so long.”

Hawke should probably brace herself for more attention. The 19-year-old is making her professional acting debut in the two-part “Little Women,” which concluded Sunday on PBS. Even for an actress who grew up surrounded by the business and trained for a year at Juilliard, the “Masterpiece” adaptation represents a major leap.

She not only portrays Jo March, a heroine as beloved as Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Shirley. She also had the responsibility of being first on the call sheet for a three-hour miniseries that features veterans Emily Watson, Michael Gambon and Angela Lansbury — all while acting on camera for the first time.

But filming for three months in Ireland was a joy, she says. “I got to act in really hard scenes every day. Twelve hours a day for three months. Right out of acting school too, which was very fortunate.”

Although she looks and sounds strikingly like her mother, with the same wide-set eyes and throaty voice, Hawke seems to share her father’s restless artistic temperament and verbose earnestness. In addition to acting, she writes, performs music, and hopes to direct. She speaks not just with her hands but with her entire upper body, clutching at her heart or closing her eyes when saying something meaningful.

Raised in New York by her famous parents, who divorced in 2005, Hawke grew up dimly aware that her family was different — “we got to just go into places and cut lines,” she recalls — but didn’t necessarily know why.

“I began to understand later — how privileged I was and also how vulnerable, so it was a journey,” she adds.

Hawke was enrolled in the drama program at Juilliard, but when the “Little Women” offer came along, she had to choose between school and work. (The school does not allow students to miss class for professional roles.) Never what she calls a “super institutional gal,” Hawke chose the latter.

Hawke connected to Jo on a profound level. “I’m a tomboy. I love reading and writing. I am clumsy. I am all these things that are attributed to her character are just things that felt very real for me, and so it wasn’t hard to just be her. I hope I get to transform in the future, but in this part, I did not have to transform. I just let out the things that sometimes I even hold in as a person.”

Heidi Thomas, who wrote the adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel and also created the PBS series “Call the Midwife,” was struck by Hawke’s sincerity. “I’ve never worked with an actor who was more straightforward, who plays her role with more meaning and more directness and more purity of intent,” she says by phone from London.

meredith.blake@latimes.com