“IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD TIME TO HAVE A BREAK AND CONNECT BACK TO WHO I AM, AND MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY”

There are many layers to the wonder of Mia Wasikowska: acclaimed actress, writer, fledgling director, former ballet dancer, bricklayer … wait, what?

“So I’ve been getting into gardening and I planted all those ferns and I did a brick path, too.”

Wasikowska is showing me a photo on her iPhone of her courtyard at home. There, forming a path through verdant ferns and flowers, is a perfectly neat row of bricks.

“Did you get a bricklayer to help you?” I ask, perplexed at the notion of the diminutive and softly spoken actress we are more akin to seeing in corsets and navigating the magical world of Alice in Wonderland laying bricks with her delicate little hands.

“No, it was me,” she says with a laugh. “My parents had the bricks at their house in Canberra, so I drove down there, piled the bricks in the car, drove back to Sydney and did the bricklaying myself.”

She stares at the photo, proudly surveying her handiwork. “I’m pretty impressed with myself,” she grins. “I’m a brickie!”

We are sitting on the edge of an amusingly noisy duck pond in a park near Wasikowska’s beachside home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Cockatoos are screeching in the gum trees above while on the water swans occasionally honk as they glide past. We have been looking for a place to sit and talk while we have our own version of a tea party: take-away coffees, ham-andcheese croissants and Anzac biscuits (it is Anzac Day, after all), but being a public holiday, every park bench is full. True to Wasikowska’s unpretentious, unassuming nature, she happily sits on a concrete step and, placing her half-eaten croissant to the side, focuses her attention on our interview.

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll wrote of his protagonist: “I could tell you my adventures – beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

While in the book: “Little Alice fell down the hole, bumped her head and bruised her soul”, in real life Wasikowska has picked herself up and brought herself out of the proverbial rabbit hole. She is emerging from a selfimposed year off after an extraordinary film acting debut at the tender age of 17 (in Suburban Mayhem) that catapulted her from teenagehood to the type of fame and intense schedule that comes with starring in one of the biggest cinematic blockbusters ( Alice in Wonderland, released in 2010, grossed $1 billion). Over the last decade she has made 20-plus films back to back, travelled around the world pursuing non-stop filming commitments, and split her time between the bright lights of Hollywood and international movie sets with her parents’ home back in Canberra where she still occupied her childhood bedroom. It was a hectic, nomadic period, she says, that ultimately left her feeling “discombobulated” and exhausted. So she stopped, bought her first apartment and proceeded to nest: cultivating the garden, swimming at her local beach, reading – not scripts, but novels by Miranda July, JM Coetzee and Elena Ferrante, among others – and dabbled in her newfound passion for directing.

The Wasikowska in the garden today appears indeed a different person to the brown-eyed ingenue we were introduced to in her breakthrough role as a suicidal teen gymnast the HBO TV series In Treatment, then films including Alice, Stoker, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, The Kids Are Alright and Tracks. Today she appears calm, centred and self-assured. “I think it’s so important for your mental health not to only do one thing and be in one world over and over again,” she says. “So it’s been really nice to have this time off.” “Especially because people get really caught up in films, and if you don’t have any experiences outside of films and you just go back to back to back, it’s just exhausting. I don’t know what you can be putting out if you’re not putting stuff back in. I think it’s so important to take some time.

“It seemed like a good time to have a break and connect back to who I am, and my friends and family and whatever else is important. I’ve been nesting in my home: I’m very much a home body. It’s so cliched to say the simple things are the best but they are! And it’s so nice to wake up in my own home, have a cup of tea and chat with my brother [who is also her flatmate] and then have a friend over and go for a walk. And be on my own clock. Because when you’re on a film you don’t own your time, you’re on such a strict schedule and therefore you don’t really feel like you own yourself either.”

It is fitting that Wasikowska has consciously taken time for herself, as time is of the essence in Alice: Through The Looking Glass, the sequel in which she reprises her eponymous title role from Tim Burton’s version of the original. In fact, time is an actual character in this film, which is another rollicking ride into Lewis Carroll’s magical world, this time directed by James Bobin ( The Muppets).

In Through The Looking Glass, Alice emerges as a woman, the captain of a ship, and one determined to steer her own path much to the chagrin of society around her. Wasikowska – modest, petite and rather intense with inquisitive eyes that make her seem older than her 26 years – strikes you as a woman who also plays by her own rules; not someone who would accept the status quo.

Intelligent and intriguing: these are adjectives I had written in my notebook after meeting Wasikowska, which are repeated by director James Bobin when describing his film’s star. They are attributes the actress shares with her most famous character, he says.

“Mia is fiercely intelligent, which I really like because I think Alice is that – Alice questions things: questions why things are the way they are,” he says. “I think Mia’s very similar to that, she does question things, which is very important, because Alice is continually questioning things … both in a pragmatic sense, but also in a more intellectual sense – like, what is reality? It’s the biggest question Lewis Carroll raises in his books, and I think that’s the sort of thing that might interest Mia, philosophically anyway. So I think she’s incredible for a number of reasons, but particularly so for that fierce intelligence.”

On set the actress was “a joy”, Bobin adds. “People love Mia. She’s really chatty and bright and so friendly. She’s thoughtful and is a great attribute to any set because we always work very hard but when you have someone who is so kind and hardworking then the crew really appreciate that.”

Wasikowska did her own stunts and Bobin was in awe of her determination and strength to stay in character in the most trying of circumstances; such as the final scene of their 85-day shoot, which involved filming on a ship set in a studio at