How Björk and Bette Davis made Mia Goth a star: “Just so perfectly flawed”
If you had to put hard-earned money on which current female actor will go on to achieve true greatness, to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Meryl Streep or Jane Fonda or perhaps Nicole Kidman, then you would definitely want to seriously consider Mia Goth.
In a little over a decade she has gone from being a model to one of the most important actors working in Hollywood, taking on brave and controversial roles right from the off, working with directors like Lars Von Trier and proving herself capable of being genuinely able to captivate on the big screen, putting in some astonishing performances in films like Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool.
Still only 31, London-born Goth completed a trilogy of movies across the post-Covid era that rightly brought her considerable acclaim, starting off in Ti West’s fantastic throwback horror X and then completely taking over the next two movies in the series, 2022’s Pearl and last year’s 1980s-set shocker MaXXXine, which ended up being the highest-grossing of the three.
It was probably Pearl that really shook things up for her, though – anyone who watched and enjoyed X will have noticed how scene-stealing Goth was, but nobody was quite prepared for the tour de force she put in on the follow-up as an amateur actor wracked with desperation and murderous intent, willing to sacrifice pretty much anything imaginable for fame.
As she continues to underline her place in film history with each role she takes on it’s interesting to see where she got inspiration for these performances, and Goth herself admits to have looked closely at some powerful, emotionally driven female characters when preparing to film Pearl, in addition to studying Michael Fassbender’s Hunger monologue for her own amazingly visceral eight minute speech in the movie.
Taking influence from the likes of Bette Davis in the faded glamour of 1962’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Goth also admits that another Von Trier film played a part in how she approached the film, namely Björk’s performance in 2000’s Dancer in the Dark, a bleak musical that also served as one movie in a trilogy.
Goth told W, “I think that’s a perfect performance. I think it’s faultless. Really, I think all female performances in Lars Von Trier’s movies are just so perfectly flawed and human and vulnerable and honest and brave.”
Icelandic musician Björk picked up a ‘Best Actress’ award for the movie, and not only that, she recorded music for the soundtrack, with one of the songs going on to be Academy Award-nominated.
Meanwhile, thanks to the acclaim Goth has rightly garnered for her first decade in films, she is starting to take the step up to big-budget blockbusters that will put her squarely in the public eye. First off, there was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein with Jacob Elordi, which opens this week, and then on another scale completely, there is not only a part in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming, star-packed epic The Odyssey with Matt Damon, but also Star Wars: Starfighter alongside Ryan Gosling.
Those films, which hit cinemas in 2026 and 2027, are likely to bring in billions of dollars at the box office and make Goth instantly recognisable to movie goers, those who don’t know her from the predominantly horror-led films she’s done so far, that is. It’s definitely worth tracking those down before it happens.
