“I love love”: Mia Goth’s dream role to end her ‘scream queen’ era
Mia Goth has found her niche, and it’s screaming.
Anyone who has seen X or Pearl will attest that she does it well. Goth, despite her slight frame and girlish face, can let out a truly guttural, shiver-inducing, hair-standing-up scream. It’s exactly the type of shrill, intense, loud cry that the entire horror genre is built on, harking back to the icons that have come before her, like Janet Leigh in the infamous shower scene from Psycho or Shelley Duvall in the axe scene in The Shining.
A good scream can make a star, and Goth undeniably carried inspiration from that fact when she took on and helped craft the dual role of Maxine Minx and Pearl in Ti West’s trilogy, helping to write a thriller figure who is desperate for that kind of stardom. Each time she screams in those movies, the sound drips with Hollywood history.
But beyond even just the scream, the actor has very much found a lane in dark, creepy and weird flicks. That seemed inevitable from the moment she signed onto a Lars Von Trier flick as her debut, starring in Nymphomaniac as her first ever role. From then on, Goth’s most notable roles have come in the form of psychological thrillers like A Cure for Wellness, body horrors like Infinity Pool, or Luca Guadagnino’s remake of a true horror classic, Suspiria. By now, that’s become the world she’s most associated with.
However, she wants to break out. “I’d like to go to the complete other end of the spectrum and make a love story,” she said to Another Magazine, longing for a complete switch-up.
It comes with a caveat, though, as Goth doesn’t want to make a cheesy, no-art rom-com. Instead, she wants to make a very particular type of love story that still has heart but also has grit and thought. She basically wants to make something like her own favourite film, as she explained, “I love love, not like a romantic comedy, but one of my favourite movies is Blue Valentine, so that kind of tone”.
When she thinks of Blue Valentine, she thinks of music and of the iconic score made by Grizzly Bear, giving the film its wistful feeling that balances the lightness and heaviness of love. “Sometimes I listen to music, and there’s something so soft and delicate about it, and I think I want to make a movie that sounds like this,” she said, wanting to take that different side of her taste, the side that is enamoured by the softer parts of the human experience, and bring that into her career.
But it would be wrong to claim that she hasn’t already. At its core, despite the intensity and darkness of it, Nymphomanic obviously does deal a lot with connection and intimacy due to its fascination with sex, even though that’s still in a classic and fucked up Lars Von Trier way. Or as the ultimate antidote to that, Goth proved she can play more lighthearted characters as she took on the ditzy role of Harriet Smith in Emma, or even the caring beacon of light in Frankenstein when she played Lady Elizabeth Harlander.
It’s not that she can only do one thing; in fact, she’s proven her depth and breadth over and over again. However, it’ll be exciting to see her completely break out of that niche one day, swapping in her scream for something softer.
