Mia Wasikowska
Mia Wasikowska
Mia Wasikowska is an Australian actress. She made her screen debut on the Australian television drama All Saints in 2004, followed by her feature film debut in Suburban Mayhem. She first became known to a wider audience following her critically acclaimed work on the HBO television series In Treatment and she received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for That Evening Sun. She gained worldwide prominence in 2010 after starring as Alice in Tim Burton's...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth14 October 1989
CityCanberra, Australia
CountryAustralia
I love Portland. I think it's one of the best cities - I obviously haven't been to very many places, but I had one of the best times I've had on a set there.
I like to think of myself as an observer.
I hate the feeling when I'm overseas, away from Australia, that I'm trapped, blocked by an ocean from getting to the people I love. That gives me anxiety.
I come from a background of independent films.
It was good but it was just a tiny bit uncomfortable because it was a day of lying in the bushes and I think I got a major muscle thing going on there! But it was good. It was fun. That is one of the things you get to do in film that you don't do, or that I don't do, in real life. I can't speak for Dermot [Mulroney]! But it was fun.
I didn't shoot any guns then or when we did the scene with Uncle Charlie [Matthew Goode] and Evie [Nicole Kidman] in the hall. I sort of pressed the button but there were no blanks or anything in there because I think it was always going to cut.
One of the producers, Wonjo, was an amazing interpreter. I don't think we really knew how it was going to work at the beginning. Yet it was something that a couple of days into it seemed so seamless and it wasn't something that we noticed or thought about. A couple of times I cornered him and forced him to speak English but we didn't speak much English at all. That said, I don't think anything was ever lost in translation. It was all very easy.
When I got onto set with him we were given a folder of storyboards. I thought that was pretty incredible because I hadn't worked with anybody who used storyboards before so he obviously had a very precise way as to how he visualized the film from the very beginning. It was every scene, but to his credit he was incredibly collaborative and gave us many opportunities to have our own input and to change things with him, so it was a really great way of working.
Everybody is completely different. I think there is no formula for filmmaking. Everybody finds their own way of doing things.
Director Park always talked to me about her in a very innocent way, that the story was of her coming of age and her sexual awakening and her going from girl to woman and that she had the same desires and hopes as other young people in terms of being very infatuated, which comes in the form of her uncle, which is very unconventional.
We have so many American and English films in Australia that we hear those accents often, so they're not too hard to pick up, but it's always a challenge.
There's a bunch of directors that I really admire, and Australian ones as well. It would be nice to do a film at home.
I love doing accents because it takes you one step away from yourself and allows you to embody someone else's character.
You are relying on a waiting on other people in acting and films, so to be able to have something that I have full creative control over is really very therapeutic.