Goth sinks teeth into richly dynamic ‘Pearl’ role
Actor, director West fleshes out character’s back story in prequel
After wrapping Ti West’s slyly subversive slasher film “X” — starring as both Maxine Minx, an aspiring starlet in a troupe of young pornographers and, under prosthetics, the deadly biddy Pearl, whose farmhouse plays host to its ill-fated, X-rated shoot — most actors might have taken a break. But Mia Goth is not most actors. Plus, she had a monologue for the ages for which to prepare.
So instead, days later, she and West and their crew launched right into work on “Pearl,” a darkly comedic gambit that turns back the clock six decades from “X’s” 1970s-set Texas massacre to a World War Iera Technicolor fantasia — and proves, in her third and most virtuosic performance in these films thus far, that the singular Goth was long overdue for a leading star turn.
Recently released by A24 to critical raves after a debut at the Venice film festival, the period psycho-thriller lands just six months after “X” hit theaters. The prequel zeroes in on Pearl, a naive young woman aching to escape her isolated rural life, who sours from starryeyed farm girl into something more sinister when her dreams of fame are threatened. It’s a richly dynamic role the likes of which Goth has never before played, and the actor, who has cultivated an eccentric body of work (“High Life,” “Suspiria”) since debuting at age 20 in Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac,” jumped at the unprecedented creative and collaborative opportunity.
“It felt like a gift more
than anything that this was even a possibility,” said Goth, who also executive produced and earned her first co-writing credit on “Pearl” with West. “Perhaps if it came to me a few years earlier, I wouldn’t have been ready as an actor with my craft to tackle something like that. But in many ways, everything that I had been working on and all that I had done up until that point was leading me to this.”
West’s pitch to A24 was daring but simple. The sprawling Texas farm set for “X” was already under construction in New Zealand, where production would take place because of the pandemic. West had similarly constructed an entire village for his 2013 thriller “The Sacrament,” only to see it struck after filming. Why not stay and make two movies?
While in seclusion at home before heading to
work on “X,” West wrote “Pearl” over FaceTime with Goth, expanding on the rich back story they had devised for the older Pearl. Her stand-alone origin story would explore how she was once, like Maxine, young and full of hope, set on becoming one of the glamorous dancers in the picture shows — until the cruelty of being a woman circa 1918, not to mention a hefty dose of inherited trauma from her austere German immigrant mother (played by Tandi Wright), sends her spiraling into madness.
At first, Pearl is trying her best to help her disapproving mother, Ruth, care for her father (Matthew Sunderland), who has fallen victim to the influenza pandemic. With her husband, Howard, at war, a series of escalating events triggers Pearl’s fraying nerves as “Pearl” unfolds into a live-wire portrait of a
female serial killer.
Goth unleashes a monster layered with complexity, vulnerability, humanity and rage, a deranged Disney heroine driven mad by her longing for the life she desires.
“Pearl is a dreamer, and she is such an emotional person, somebody who wears her heart on her sleeve and is quite sensitive. To be able to have a character like that to sink your teeth into was so rich,” said Goth. “She has all these dreams, all of these aspirations. She’s looking forward to the future.”
A running theme in the overarching franchise (a third film, “MaXXXine,” will see the “X” survivor take on Hollywood in the sleazy ’80s) is how people and their ambitions are shaped by the cinema they consume.
That tragic undercurrent is woven into the film’s textures: Pearl’s pet alligator, for example, is named after silent sex siren Theda Bara, whose life’s work largely perished in a fire and remains lost to time, while West and director of photography Eliot Rockett’s references range from the women’s pictures of George Cukor and Douglas Sirk to “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Looking to the movies as a way to solve your problems, I think, is going to be something people always do,” said West. “But showbiz is a funny thing, where there’s so much more failure associated with it than there is success. Of the small number of people who are doing it, most are unhappy with the degree of success they have. And even the ones that are still had a lot of failure as well.”
Days after the “X” shoot ended, Goth threw herself into “Pearl” dance rehearsals. Production designer Tom Hammock gave the rundown 1970s farmhouse set a vibrant makeover between films, and costume designer Malgosia Turzanska designed period dresses with corseting and bustles, in contrast to the skin-baring outfits of “X.” Exhaustion carried over from the previous film shoot, but so did excitement. After going through the process of “X” and writing “Pearl” together, West and Goth had built up a crucial sense of trust.
Goth delivers a heartstopping monologue at the film’s crescendo, a roaring beast of a moment that brings the tension, tragedy and terror of “Pearl” hurtling toward its grandiose finale. And it was Goth and West’s mutual trust and close creative collaboration that led to the most memorable shot of the film, an uncomfortably lingering hold on Pearl’s strained smile that goes from comical to haunting to deeply disturbing the longer it continues — a viscerally unsettling sight that places Goth’s Pearl, if not side by side, then in conversation with Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning “Joker” turn.
“I had this idea: We were going to end it with this smile, and then I’d pick a freeze frame of the most interesting, subtextual moment of the smile,” said West. Right before filming, he asked Goth: “What if you hold a smile as long as you possibly can and let’s see what happens?”
It was a moment so organic, Goth hardly remembers being in it. “I think any sort of thinking within a scene can push an actor into trouble, and it’s best to just feel it all.”
She held it for three excruciating minutes. They filmed just one take. “Then, we cut, and I thought, ‘This is the perfect ending for the movie,’ ” said West. “It was a spur-of-the-moment idea that seemed like, ‘I’ve never seen this before. Let’s see what this is like.’ ”