Mia Wasikowska
By Glenn Close
Photography Craig Mcdean
As Charlotte Brontë's famous governess in
Cary Joji Fukunaga's adaptation of
Jane Eyre (2011),
Mia Wasikowska is so ethereal as to seem almost translucent. But if we feel we can look through her and see clearly what she's feeling, her thoughts remain closed off from us, hidden behind dark, still eyes. It is no surprise, then, when Edward Rochester, played by
Michael Fassbender, asks, mystified, "Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre?" They sit by a fire, but Wasikowska's Eyre seems to receive no warmth from it. "I can see in you the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage," Rochester says, "a vivid, restless, captive; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high."
In her brief but brilliant career, Wasikowska, now 24, has played a variety of gothic heroines, both classic and contemporary—restless captives all, and all of them trying to break free. Her Alice in Tim Burton's
Alice in Wonderland (2010) is a chaste teen fleeing the call of adulthood for fantasy—she is a cinematic sibling to Wasikowska's teen vampire Ava in
Jim Jarmusch's
Only Lovers Left Alive, a lusty immortal trapped in perpetual adolescence and the existential crisis that comes with it. But even as the budding daughter to two moms in
The Kids Are All Right (2010), Wasikowska isn't
only an angsty teen. No matter how caged her birds may be, they never lack the agency to determine their own lives. As the fire-scarred young woman in this September's feverish Hollywood satire
Maps to the Stars, written by Bruce Wagner and directed by David Cronenberg, Wasikowska's seemingly captive character throws down her shackles to wreak some serious havoc. She may play the restless prisoner well, but she does psychological terror unleashed even better. Which makes her casting as the ultimate tragic captive, Emma Bovary, in an upcoming adaptation of Flaubert's classic novel a kind of poetic justice.
Wasikowska recently returned to her native Australia to film this September's
Tracks, John Curran's film based on Robyn Davidson's memoir of her 1,700-mile walk across the continent. But Wasikowska's own trek through the outback was less like a walkabout and more like a return to her roots. As she tells her
Albert Nobbs (2011) co-star Glenn Close, the experience of making that movie brought to a close the restlessness and rootlessness she had been feeling. These days Wasikowska is feeling right at home.
GLENN CLOSE: Hi! How are you?
MIA WASIKOWSKA: Good. I finished a film two weeks ago in Toronto. I was there for five months. Then I went to Cannes, and then home for a week to Australia, and now I'm here.
CLOSE: Wow. What was the film in Toronto?
WASIKOWSKA:
Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo Del Toro, who did
Pan's Labyrinth [2006].
CLOSE: I love that film.
WASIKOWSKA: This is a kind of gothic love story and thriller. It was really good, but it was the longest shoot I've ever done. I usually do, you know, six-week shoots or something.
CLOSE: Five months. That is a long time. And who were you acting with?
WASIKOWSKA: Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, and Charlie Hunnam; a great cast. How are you? Are you in Maine?
CLOSE: No, I'm in Westchester. Annie [Starke, Close's daughter] is here.
WASIKOWSKA: Say hi for me! How is she?
CLOSE: She's wonderful. She starts a movie herself next week up in the Boston area, so we're going to drive up on Monday.
WASIKOWSKA: That's exciting. Are you working at the moment?
CLOSE: I am doing a part in an independent film called
The Great Gilly Hopkins with Sophie Nélisse, who was in
The Book Thief. It's a lovely story, so I'm happy to be there. So just this afternoon I watched
Tracks, and it blew my mind. My gosh. First of all, how long did it take you to film that?
WASIKOWSKA: It was about an eight-week shoot, in the desert in Australia.
CLOSE: And how much training did you do with the camels?
WASIKOWSKA: I was lucky enough to meet Robyn Davidson, who wrote the book the film is based on, and who I play in the film. The two of us went up to South Australia and spent maybe three days doing a camel boot camp. It was us and Andrew Hop, our camel wrangler, hanging out with a lot of camels. I was so scared at first, but they're super gentle, and very quickly you learn how to judge their temperaments. They like to test you, though. The camels didn't accept me as a leader for the first two days. [
laughs] But then they were like, "Oh, okay, I'll follow you." They're really funny.
CLOSE: What did Robyn do with her camels after she did the trek?
WASIKOWSKA: She found a really great family in Woodleigh, on the west coast of Australia. The family had kids, and they loved the camels and took really good care of them. She used to go back and visit them. Then they had to sell the farm and move, so the camels were given to somebody else who didn't take good care of them. Robyn was living in London at the time and she went back to get them out of there. She took them to another farm, but then, tragically, their fence was broken and the camels all ran off. She was really heartbroken.
CLOSE: So they're feral again.
WASIKOWSKA: Exactly.
CLOSE: The times I've been in Australia, I really noticed the use of the word
feral—feral cats, feral dogs, and now feral camels. [
both laugh] Did you have pets when you were growing up? Do you feel an affinity with animals, or was this something that you had to get used to?
WASIKOWSKA: We asked for a dog but we weren't allowed one. I loved animals so much, but we didn't really grow up with them, until a bit later on, when everybody started rebelling and bringing home rabbits and fish. We had almost everything
other than dogs, which ended up being so much more trouble than if we just got a dog. If one of us got a rabbit, then everybody had to get a rabbit, and then it was three rabbits and three hutches. It was a disaster. [
both laugh]
CLOSE: The dog part of the story in
Tracks was very touching. And as somebody who grew up with dogs and has never been without one trotting
behind me, I could understand her despair.
WASIKOWSKA: I think Robyn felt like she'd never had a friend like her dog, so that's pretty heartbreaking.
CLOSE: Did she really have to shoot her?
WASIKOWSKA: She did. It was horrible. I heard you had a blog for dogs?
CLOSE: I did, and I loved it. I would interview people in our profession who loved dogs. So just one more camel question—did any of the camels get to know you? Did you kind of have an affinity? I noticed you almost kissed the little camel on the lips at one point. [
laughs] Its lips went way out. It was so cute.
WASIKOWSKA: Really? That's funny. I loved them so much. They were a constant source of entertainment for everybody. One camel decided it didn't like Adam Driver, who played Rick [Smolan, the National Geographic photographer who documented Davidson's trek]. Every time Adam went near him, the camel would gurgle and growl. It became such a joke. I would love to see the baby one now, because she was so little on the film.
CLOSE: What made you want to do this particular story?
WASIKOWSKA: Well, I read the book; I actually read the script first and I loved it so much. I think people react really differently to the circumstances of their life, and there was something about the way that Robyn reacted to all of the events in her life—culminating in this idea that she wanted to take this trip out of the blue—that was so beautiful. There was an element of testing herself, putting herself on the line, wanting to know she could go through something and come through on the other side. There's a rite of passage to becoming a grown-up that I think we all put ourselves through. And I loved the way she did it. I felt like I understood her. I never had a problem understanding why she would want to do something like that. It seemed perfectly fine to remove yourself from the everyday.
CLOSE: It really communicated the noise of our civilization. Everywhere you turn, it's talk, talk, talk. To find yourself in silence and space, going through the crucible of the desert—I could totally understand it.
WASIKOWSKA: We used to go camping a lot growing
up, and I could never understand why other people would bring a boom box. We'd be in the bush, in the forest, and there'd be like
bmph bmph bmph. That doesn't make any sense!
CLOSE: I know. Bringing all the noise with you. What was it like for you, personally, to be in that desert during the movie?
WASIKOWSKA: It was great. I hadn't filmed in Australia since I was 17. It had been such a long time since I'd worked in my own home country that I started thinking of the two things as separate—home was Australia and work was somewhere else. It was amazing to merge the two, and it was super important, I think, especially at that time in my life—which is still now, I guess—to connect to my home while I was doing my work. So even though it was isolating being in the desert, I felt a lot less isolated than I have on other films because I was on the same time frame as my family. I could pick up the phone at any time during the day and call friends or call home. That was really nice. I have this funny thing that, if war breaks out, or if anything catastrophic goes down, I want to know that I can walk home. 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.
CLOSE: That's something that I never would have thought of, but you said it very eloquently. Home for you is still very much Australia, and it's a long flight. I think it's one of the hardest things about our business, that most of the time you have to go away from your home.
WASIKOWSKA: How did you feel as a young actress, traveling a lot? Did it feel isolating for you?
CLOSE: It probably really kicked in when I had Annie because I was very aware of being away from home. But for you, it's not only being away from home but being across a huge ocean. Do you think that has affected your work?
WASIKOWSKA: Maybe. It affected the way that I felt. I never felt like I lived in L.A. or New York or America. I've just been in transit for the last five years. I'd always been like, "I don't really have a reason to settle in L.A. I don't have friends and family there ..." But after
Tracks, I thought, "Oh no, I'm definitely going to live here." Something about the peace of mind leaving that film set, which, when I was younger, was so heartbreaking, to have formed such close bonds with people and then everybody leaves and you don't know where you'll see them. But this was like, "Oh! They're going back to Sydney. We can have coffee next weekend," which is never possible when I'm out of the country.
CLOSE: I have such fond memories of your mom and dad and that beautiful book of photographs they put together of the making of
Albert Nobbs. Was it your mom who did that, or did they do it together?
WASIKOWSKA: I think my dad might have done it, but maybe my mom had some pictures in there.
CLOSE: Beautiful. I remember being so incredibly impressed by your photography as well. Did you take some photos out in the desert?
WASIKOWSKA: I didn't. I was sort of overwhelmed, and I didn't really have it on my mind. So, funny enough, I replaced photography with knitting and became an obsessive knitter, knitting beanies obsessively in 50-degree heat [122 degrees Fahrenheit].