Mia Goth’s love/hate relationship with acting: “Actually the hardest thing to do”
One thing about Hollywood that has remained true for many a year is that once it decides you’re hot, it wants to put you in pretty much everything. Sometimes it isn’t for the best (cough, Russell Brand), but sometimes it does work, and in the case of Mia Goth, the movie world is reaping the benefits.
Unlike some actors who get shoved into a load of films seemingly overnight, though, Goth has steadily climbed to the top (and by top, we mean not just the latest Christopher Nolan film, but a Star Wars film too) by putting in some show-stopping performances in a variety of genuinely different movies over the course of a decade.
Anyone who makes their debut in a Lars Von Trier film is not going to be a shrinking violet, and if it’s called Nymphomaniac, then you can underline that fact. Goth took that project on in 2013 at just 19 and hasn’t looked back since, although it took her horror trilogy with Ti West to bring her to public attention.
Those three films, X, Pearl and MaXXXine, stand as one of the most interesting projects made by any director in recent cinema; all are very different and varying in quality, but Goth binds them together with a fairly staggering performance throughout, going from porn starlet to terrifying, murderous old woman to desperate, unhinged wannabe without missing a beat.
It’s possible that not enough time has passed to properly put what she achieved making those films in perspective, although her pleading, zeitgeist-capturing “I’m a star!” scene in Pearl has swept through the internet and landed as a meme, and her nine-minute monologue in the same film is something to behold.
Goth likes to challenge herself when taking roles, believing art should be daring and ask questions and sometimes, as her films have shown, shock people. And she also thinks deeply about what it is she is trying to achieve. She recently told Time: “The truth is, I hate acting. Acting is actually the hardest thing to do. It’s this elusive thing, and you think you have it – it’s like trying to grip smoke. (But) I love it so much.”
An actor as good as Goth was never going to stay in independent, arty films for long, and the last couple of years have seen her begin to make the transition from a word-of-mouth secret to a major movie poster performer, stealing the show yet again this year in Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix blockbuster Frankenstein.
But if you want to see her at her best, the heady cocktail she has perfected of innocence, insanity, seduction and terror, then her movie from 2023, Infinity Pool, is one to see as soon as possible. Directed by Brandon Cronenberg (yes, David’s son, but a hell of a director in his own right, check out 2020’s jaw-dropping Possessor), Goth leads us, and Alexander Skarsgård, into a twisting, sex-fuelled, mind-alteringly gruesome nightmare that will make you reconsider ever having a weekend away with ‘that nice couple we know’.
Now, London-born Goth continues her ascent to the big leagues, going opposite Ryan Gosling in 2027’s Star Wars: Starfighter, plus that previously mentioned Nolan movie, The Odyssey, which will appear globally in IMAX on July 17th next year.
And she’ll also star in Marvel’s Blade, a reboot of the Wesley Snipes franchise that has seen several delays, but that’s ok according to Goth because the producers, “Want to make a great movie. That’s the sense that I get from them, and that feels good.”
