Mia Wasikowska stars as Alice, in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which opens March 5.
Meet Alice in Wonderland.
No matter that filmmaker Tim Burton made changes to Lewis Carroll’s classic tale for his new 3D movie — Mia Wasikowska, 20, looks like everybody’s ideal Alice.
Serene and serious, the young actress has gone from obscurity to lead roles in only a couple of years, stopping along the way long enough to impress viewers of TV’s In Treatment and anyone who saw the movies Defiance or Amelia.
Wasikowska won the lead in Alice in Wonderland against stiff competition, and she co-stars with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. The film opens March 5.
Wasikowska, who visited Toronto recently to help promote the movie, is the daughter of two visual artists and an accomplished photographer herself. When she’s not making movies all over the world, the actress still lives at home in Canberra, Australia, with her parents and brother and sister.
Up until age 15, Wasikowska had her heart set on ballet.
“I really loved ballet and I was intense about it. I did about 34 or 35 hours a week for maybe two years,” she says. “I loved it, but it became very much about this perfection. There was so much negativity associated with the dance world, and it just seemed like it was constant. It’s a very hard industry. I was very passionate about it, but I loved film and felt it was more about imperfections, and I thought that was very true to life. Acting suited me better. I wanted to try another type of performance.”
To make the transition to acting, Wasikowska got on the phone and found herself an agent. She laughs quietly when she admits that at 15, she figured she was already too old to start acting.
“I was this funny teenager, in that I never felt I was doing enough, achieving enough. I thought, ‘Ohhhh, it’s too late. I’ve probably missed it,’ but I thought I’d give it a try.”
It was love at first act. “From the first thing I did, a guest appearance on an Australian television drama, I fell completely in love with acting. And I wanted to keep doing it.”
And she has. Wasikowska will soon start filming a new version of Jane Eyre opposite Michael Fassbender, and she co-stars in the indie comedy The Kids Are All Right with Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, playing the daughter to their same-sex couple. Her cropped hair was required for her role in Gus Van Sant’s Restless. This girl is busy.
“I like to do projects that challenge me, and hopefully in turn challenge the audience, or open your eyes to something you’re not aware of,” she says.
“I love stories and characters and exploring characters — and it’s very therapeutic, to me, to do this.”
Wasikowska says she thinks the best cinema provokes thought or action. She’s interested in experimental cinema, too, and mentions Czech director Jan Svankmajer’s dark, weird, stop-motion Alice film (Neco z Alenky). “That’s the sort of thing I hope cinema can do — bring the story to another generation, spark interest in the story,” she says. “Alice is such an incredible book.”
Asked if her career ascent feels fast or slow to her, Wasikowska says it’s a little of both.
“I never actually thought anything would happen in acting for me, so it feels kind of fast,” she says. “And I never thought I’d be in this position, not even in 50 years time,” she says of her Alice role, “so that part feels fast too.” On the other hand, she adds, her progression from role to role has been gradual.
“So nothing feels as if I’ve been thrust in the middle of something I’m not ready for, or couldn’t handle.”
Mia had a lot of alone time
It’s tricky living in a world created by fantasy king Tim Burton.
Filming the complicated visual wonder of Alice In Wonderland, Wasikowska says, was not exactly as you’d imagine. Being a part of Burton’s crowded, colourful landscape in Wonderland was often a matter of being solo.
“I was often alone,” says the actress, of filming the special-effects laden movie.
“I did do a lot of scenes with other actors, but for much of the film Alice is either three inches tall or eight feet tall, so the two extremes meant that whenever I was in a scene where I was a different height, we’d work separately. I’d be in Johnny Depp’s hat, or in his pocket or on his shoulder, and of course we did those scenes separately.
“On the days we were the same height and on the same scale, it was so exciting to actually look at another actor in the eyes and do the scene with them. It takes a lot of energy to do scenes with a tennis ball and sticky tape or cardboard cutouts,” she says, smiling. “It’s a different style of filmmaking and one I’d never encountered before.
