Mia Wasikowska ( VU-shi-KOF-skə; born 25 October 1989) is an Australian actress. She made her screen debut on the Australian television drama All Saints in 2004, followed by her feature film debut in Suburban Mayhem (2006). She first became known to a wider audience following her critically acclaimed work on the HBO television series In Treatment (2008). She was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for the film That Evening Sun (2009).
Wasikowska gained worldwide recognition in 2010 after starring as Alice in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and appearing in the comedy-drama film The Kids Are All Right. She starred in Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre (2011), Gus Van Sant's Restless (2011), Park Chan-wook's Stoker (2013), Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), John Curran's Tracks (2013), Richard Ayoade's The Double (2013), David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars (2014), and Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak (2015). In 2016, she reprised her role as Alice in the film Alice Through the Looking Glass, and has since appeared in a number of independent films, including Damsel (2018), Judy and Punch (2019), Bergman Island (2021), and Leviticus (2026).
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Early life
Wasikowska was born Mia Reid Wasikowska on 25 October 1989 in Canberra, Australia. She attended Cook Primary School, Ainslie Primary School and Canberra High School, and Karabar High School in Queanbeyan, which neighbours Canberra. She has an older sister, Jess, and a younger brother, Kai. Her mother, Marzena Wasikowska, is a Polish photographer, while her father, John Reid, is an Australian photographer and collagist. In 1998, when she was eight years old, Wasikowska and her family moved to Szczecin, Poland for a year, after her mother received a grant to produce a collection of work based on her own experience of emigrating from Poland to Australia in 1974 at the age of 11. Wasikowska and her siblings took part in the production as subjects; she explained to Johanna Schneller of The Globe and Mail in July 2010, "We never had to smile or perform. We weren't always conscious of being photographed. We'd just do our thing, and she'd take pictures of us."
At the age of nine, Wasikowska began studying ballet with Jackie Hallahan at the Canberra Dance Development Centre, with hopes of going professional. She began dancing en pointe at thirteen, and was training 35 hours a week in addition to attending school full-time. Her daily routine consisted of leaving school in the early afternoon and dancing until nine o'clock at night. A spur on her heel hampered her dancing. Her passion for ballet also waned due to the increasing pressure to achieve physical perfection and her growing dissatisfaction with that world in general, and she quit at the age of fourteen. However, she credits ballet with improving her ability to handle her nerves in auditions.
At the same time, she had been exposed to European and Australian cinema at an early age, and was particularly moved by Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy and Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career. Although shy and averse to performing during her school years, she was inspired to try to break into acting after seeing Holly Hunter in The Piano and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. She felt acting in film was a way to explore human imperfections. She looked up twelve Australian talent agencies on the Internet and contacted them all, but received only one response. Despite her lack of acting experience, she arranged a meeting after persistent callbacks.
Career
2005–2009: Early work
Wasikowska landed her first acting role in 2004 with a two-episode stint on the Australian drama series All Saints. She had just turned 15 when she was cast in her Australian film debut, Suburban Mayhem (2006), for which she was nominated for a Young Actor's AFI Award. That year she also appeared in her first short film, Lens Love Story, in which she had no dialogue.
In 2007, Wasikowska appeared in the crocodile horror film Rogue, alongside Radha Mitchell and Sam Worthington. She observed quietly on the set; fellow actor Stephen Curry noted, "We didn't hear a peep out of her for three weeks, which earned her the nickname of 'Rowdy'". She beat nearly 200 other actresses for a part in the drama September (2007) when she was cast on the spot by director Peter Carstairs following her audition. She starred in Spencer Susser's acclaimed short film I Love Sarah Jane, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
At the age of seventeen, Wasikowska received her first big break role in the United States when she was cast as Sophie, a suicidal gymnast, in HBO's acclaimed weekly drama In Treatment; she auditioned for the role by videotape. The part required her to leave school in Canberra and move to Los Angeles for three months, while enrolling in correspondence courses. She earned critical acclaim for her performance as the troubled teenager treated by psychotherapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne), which included praise for her American accent. She revealed in an October 2008 interview with Variety that she was something of a mimic as a child, and that the widely available American films and TV shows in Australia made it easier for Australians to learn to speak like Americans.
This show enabled Wasikowska to gain roles in American films. She played Chaya, the young wife of Asael Bielski (Jamie Bell) in Defiance (2008). Director Edward Zwick cast her, explaining to the Australian edition of Vogue, "Her inner life is so vivid that it comes across even when she's being still." Her next role was as aviation pioneer Elinor Smith in Mira Nair's 2009 biopic Amelia. In June 2008, for her work on In Treatment, she received an Australians in Film Breakthrough Award.
Wasikowska played the supporting role of Pamela Choat in the 2009 Southern Gothic independent film That Evening Sun opposite Hal Holbrook. Director Scott Teems, seeking a young actress who bore a resemblance to Sissy Spacek, initially balked at the casting director's suggestion of Wasikowska for the role. He wanted to cast all native Southerners for the sake of authenticity. However, after auditions with other actresses were unsuccessful, Teems relented and summoned Wasikowska for an audition. During the two hours she had to prepare, she watched Coal Miner's Daughter online to quickly learn a Southern accent, and impressed Teems enough to be the only non-American actor in the film. She was nominated for a 2009 Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female, and the film received a South by Southwest award for Best Ensemble Cast.
2010–2016: Breakthrough and critical acclaim
In July 2008, Wasikowska was cast as the eponymous heroine in Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland, alongside Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter. She sent a videotaped audition to casting directors in London, and her first live reading in Los Angeles occurred on the same day as her Evening Sun audition. After three more auditions in London, she was given the role. Burton cited her "old-soul quality" as a catalyst in casting her: "Because you're witnessing this whole thing through her eyes, it needed somebody who can subtly portray that."
Wasikowska portrayed a nineteen-year-old Alice returning to Wonderland for the first time in over a decade after falling down a rabbit hole from an unwanted marriage proposal. Her affinity for the character played a part in her desire for the role, as she had read the Lewis Carroll books as a child and was a fan of Jan Švankmajer's 1988 stop-motion film Alice. She considered Burton's film as a chance to explore a deeper characterisation of Alice, to whom she felt young women her age could relate, saying: "Alice has a certain discomfort within herself, within society and among her peers; I [...] have definitely felt similarly about all of those things, so I could really understand her not fitting in. Alice also [is] an observer who is thinking a lot, and that's similar to how I am."
For Lisa Cholodenko's indie comedy The Kids Are All Right, Wasikowska was cast as Joni, the bookish daughter of a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who was conceived via artificial insemination. At her younger brother's (Josh Hutcherson) request, she seeks out their biological father (Mark Ruffalo). During shooting, she successfully campaigned to have Joni wear pajamas in several home scenes. She explained to Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore, "[Joni's] very comfortable in her place, with who she is. So I pushed to have her, whenever she was at home, in her pajamas. That's comfortable! And that's something I do."
On 25 October, Wasikowska was honored with the Hollywood Awards' Breakthrough Actress Award, which was presented to her by Bryce Dallas Howard, and she won the Australian Film Institute International Award for Best Actress on 12 December for her performance in Alice in Wonderland. According to Forbes, Alice in Wonderland was amongst the highest-grossing films of 2010 with $1.025 billion. As of May 2022, it is the 44th-highest-grossing film of all time.
2017–present: Independent films
In May 2015, Wasikowska joined the cast of Cédric Jimenez's historical thriller The Man with the Iron Heart, based on the novel HHhH. She starred alongside Jason Clarke, Rosamund Pike, Jack O'Connell and Jack Reynor. Principal photography began 14 September 2015 in Prague and Budapest, and ended on 1 February 2016. The film was released in 2017. The same year, she starred in Spike Jonze's stage show Changers: A Dance Story, alongside Lakeith Stanfield. Featuring dance choreography by Ryan Heffington, the show premiered at an Opening Ceremony fashion week presentation in September 2017 before opening to the public for a four-night run at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.
In 2018, she appeared in David and Nathan Zellner's black comedy western Damsel, reuniting with her Maps to the Stars co-star Robert Pattinson, and in Nicolas Pesce's psychosexual thriller Piercing, based on Ryū Murakami's 1994 novel of the same name. The following year, she starred in Mirrah Foulkes' feature directorial debut Judy and Punch. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 27 January 2019. From July to August 2019, Wasikowska made her theatre debut as Ralph in the Sydney Theatre Company production of Nigel Williams' stage adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. She next appeared in Roger Michell's drama Blackbird, alongside Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet. It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September 2019.
Wasikowska's sole release of 2020 was Netflix's The Devil All the Time, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock directed by Antonio Campos. She was part of an ensemble cast formed by Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Sebastian Stan and previous collaborators Clarke and Pattinson, among others names. In 2021, she starred in Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island, alongside Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth and Anders Danielsen Lie. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on 11 July 2021. As of 2021, Wasikowska had moved to focus more on directing and filmmaking with a feature film script written and was seeking financiers. In 2022, she starred in Robert Connolly's family drama Blueback, alongside Eric Bana, which had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2023, she portrayed an unusual schoolteacher in Jessica Hausner's dark comedy thriller film Club Zero.
In 2026, Mia was executive producer and starred in Australian coming-of-age romantic supernatural horror Leviticus.
Personal life
In her spare time, Wasikowska is an avid photographer, often chronicling her travels and capturing images of her film sets with a Rolleiflex camera. During production of Jane Eyre, she had a secret pocket sewn into one of her costumes to conceal a digital camera that she used between takes. One of her on-set images, of Fukunaga and Jane Eyre co-star Jamie Bell, was selected as a finalist in the 2011 National Photographic Portrait Prize hosted by Australia's National Portrait Gallery on 24 February 2011. From 2013 to 2015, Wasikowska dated actor Jesse Eisenberg, her co-star in The Double. Wasikowska resides in Sydney, Australia. She speaks some Polish.
