‘I think violence … catches on,’ Stoker star says
Mia Wasikowska — a top-paid actress at 23 — says thriller focuses on ‘evil as contagious”
“The kids of photographers grow up being told not to smile,” says Mia Wasikowska, the flicker of a grin twitching at the corners of her mouth. The 23-year-old, recently described as “the ‘it’ girl of quality cinema” has had years of practice, then, for the role of sombre-faced India Stoker in Park Chan-wook’s stunningly perverse new thriller Stoker.
It’s India’s voice we hear first: The film opens with a monologue about the nature of freedom, as the girl — wearing her mother’s silk blouse and her father’s belt — gazes victoriously across a windblown expanse of waving corn. But it’s her wonderful repertoire of pouts, frowns and inscrutable stares that carry the film through its tense silences, erotic ambiguities and vintage noir twists.
As watchful, defensive and selfaware as her character, Wasikowska retreats into the upholstered corner of her chair while talking about the film during a recent interview in London. She leans forward to discuss its themes and her co-stars, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode. But when talking about herself and her character she cradles her elbows and tilts her head seriously, while her gaze stays steadily fixed.
At times, she looks like she wants to take a shrinking potion, as she did in the title role of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2011). At others, she’s challengingly clever and self-possessed, like the girl she played opposite Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in the sophisticated, 2010 comedy The Kids Are All Right.
As Kidman recently told the press, it’s rare to meet a young actress who’s not glued to her smartphone between takes. On the set of Stoker, Wasikowska sat quietly reading Chekhov, Mamet and Tennessee Williams.
Born and raised in Canberra, Australia, Wasikowska is the middle child of three, with an older sister and a younger brother. Both her parents are photographers who, she says, “educated us in a very visual way, a cultural way which I’m very grateful for now. It’s the sort of thing you appreciate in hindsight, being dragged to galleries.”
Her American break came with the role of suicidal gymnast Sophie in the HBO series In Treatment; and from there she was catapulted into the big league. Forbes magazine ranked her one of the highest-gross- ing actors of 2010. She has since starred in Cary Fukunaga’s sensitive Jane Eyre, Gus Van Sant’s Restless and the prohibition-era crime drama Lawless, written by saturnine Aussie rock singer Nick Cave.
Despite Stoker’s titular nod toward the creator of Dracula, “it’s less about evil being in the bloodline than an idea of evil as contagious,” says Wasikowska. “I think violence is something that catches on. I was interested in something India’s father says: ‘Sometimes you have to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse.’”