Growing up with a single mother, the 'Pearl' actress wanted another life when she was young and would flip through magazines while envisioning a life in a different home.
- Feb 12, 2023
AceShowbiz - Mia Goth flipped through Ikea magazines as she plotted her childhood escape. Discovered aged 14 by fashion photographer Gemma Booth, the 29-year-old star dreamed of another life and found herself "trying to plan out my escape."
"I was in a constant state of escapism as a child. I would even flick through Ikea magazines and envision living in different homes and what it would be like to have a car. It was me and my mum, and I grew up in a single...," she told Total Film magazine. "Ikea magazines, watching movies, reading books... I was always trying to plan out my escape exit of the situation I was in."
The idea of dreaming and escape is a big part of new slasher movie "Pearl" - a prequel to "X" - and director Ti West pointed her in the direction of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Mary Poppins" as inspiration for the film as a whole.
He explained, "I definitely have a real reverence for the craft of filmmaking. I certainly approach movies visually, first and foremost. So, camera, direction and the aesthetics of the movie are very important to me. I do come to it from a classical approach. It just happens to be that the movies I make are, you know, kind of weird. It's a strange thing to see someone beheaded in a Disney movie."
Although Mia did watch "The Wizard of Oz" and "Mary Poppins" "during the beginning" of her preparation to "get a sense of the world we're in" and what the filmmaker wanted, she didn't take inspiration from them for her own acting.
She said, "Those films are quite magical and surreal; they're not very grounding. So I didn't refer to those films when I was building my character and trying to ground her in truth. I was actually looking at movies like Lars von Trier's 'Dancer in the Dark', with Bjork. That, for me, was far more useful, because I think that film is more honest. I had to root it in truth."
