Who is Mia Goth, scream queen and star of the new Star Wars?

By Laura Catz.

It was in 2014 that British actress Mia Goth first made waves in Hollywood. At just 19 years old, she landed her first major role in a controversial drama, Nymphomaniac, directed by the notorious Lars von Trier and co-starring global icons like Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Mia Goth’s breakthrough role in Nymphomaniac

Her role? Simulating numerous sex scenes, intimidating and dominating older men, sometimes with a firearm. While her pout is reminiscent of that of Adèle Exarchopoulos, who was born the same year, Mia Goth also shares with her a certain boldness when it comes to choosing her debut roles. 

As P, the protégé of Jo (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who ends up becoming her sexual object, confidante and lover, Mia Goth established herself as a one-of-a-kind actress. Her fresh, innocent face gives her a doll-like flair, but it never quite conceals the mysterious and provocative edge that makes her so unsettling…

A captivating nonchalance

Don’t bother looking for her on social media. Mia Goth avoids selfies and denounces the cult of self-promotion. This sets her apart from other rising stars of her generation and makes her all the more intriguing. However, there are plenty of photos of Mia Goth.

First, she began her career in modeling, shortly before meeting Shia LaBeouf, her Nymphomaniac co-star, and saying yes to him in Las Vegas in October 2016. Together they have a child, and an on-and-off relationship that continues to this day.

From that moment on, her every move has been captured by a swarm of paparazzi, up until her divorce two years later. And in the pages of tabloids, Mia Goth is always pouting.

When she posed for Miu Miu in 2015, she wore her sulky pout with disarming candor. The ad campaign was even banned in the UK, deemed scandalous for portraying a child dressed as a grown woman in a sexually suggestive pose… even though she was 22 at the time. But in reality, the actress is far from the moody teenager that her image suggests. She sees herself more as a “grandma,” preferring deep, one-on-one conversations to “stupid selfies,” as she told i-D in 2016. A fearless grandmother, all in all.

Charlotte Gainsbourg as her role model

It was her own grandmother, a renowned Brazilian actress named Maria Gladys, who instilled in her the love of cinema. Raised in a nomadic family, Mia Mello Gypsy Da Silva Goth grew up between Canada with her father and Rio with her mother, before settling in London, the city where was born. She had planned to study acting, until she met Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom she considers as “the best teacher.”

Determined to fully embody her characters, Mia Goth doesn’t hesitate to sleep on the street, go without taking a shower for five weeks, or stick to a 900-calorie-a-day diet to play Milja in The Survivalist (2015), Stephen Fingleton’s apocalyptic thriller in which she lives in a cabin lost in the forest.

Although she fiercely guards her private life, Mia Goth is remarkably generous with film directors. She makes her mark through dramatic roles that require struggle and endurance, rather than settling for comfortable, easy parts.

The heroine of Suspiria has a taste for strangeness

“The darker, the better,” she told i-D in 2016. A dark force seems to guide Mia Goth’s choices. In 2017, she played Hannah, an enigmatic patient confined in a Swiss institute plagued by sinister medical staff, in A Cure for Wellness. A mesmerizing performance that captivated director Gore Verbinski (The Ring) so much that he reportedly forgot to cut the camera between takes. The intensity of Mia Goth’s acting is probably due to that something mystical about her.

The one who openly admits her distaste for the supernatural has nonetheless reached for the stars when she played in Luca Guadagnino’s nightmarish Suspiria (2018) alongside Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson. True to her rigorous standards, Mia Goth keeps enriching her filmography with cinematic gems, exclusively choosing standout indie films. She was seen in High Life (2018), Claire Denis’s anxiety-ridden sci-fi thriller with Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche, in Emma. (2020) with Anya Taylor-Joy and Josh O’Connor, and in Infinity Pool (2023) by Brandon Cronenberg.

A new chapter in her career with X, Pearl, and MaXXXine

In 2022, Mia Goth’s career entered a new phase, thanks to director Ti West, who cast her as the lead in the horror film X about a massacre happening on the set of a 1970s porn movie. That same year, she also shone in Pearl, another installment in the trilogy including X by the same director, and embodied an angry and dangerous aspiring dancer-actress.

Her searing performance in Pearl caught the attention of none other than filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who praised the intense performance of the young actress. In the final chapter of the trilogy, MaXXXine, released in July 2024, Mia Goth once again takes on the role of an actress seeking rebirth in a neon-lit Los Angeles atmosphere in the 1980s. And once again, the 31-year-old actress dazzles us in the horror genre.

The star of the upcoming Star Wars

While her detour into Ti West’s cinema revealed new sides of this prolific actress, Mia Goth will soon return to the screen in more unexpected roles. She is set to appear in blockbuster productions like Frankenstein (2025) by Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) and The Odyssey (2026) by Christopher Nolan.

Besides, she will also share the screen with Ryan Gosling in the upcoming Star Wars film titled Starfighter. In this new chapter of the epic saga directed by Shawn Levy (Deadpool, Wolverine), she is expected to play an adversary to the Drive actor. That role was originally turned down by Oscar-winning actress Mikey Madison…

MaXXXine (2024) by Ti West is available on Canal VOD. Frankenstein (2025) by Guillermo del Toro and Starfighter (2027) by Shawn Levy have no official release date yet.