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Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Mia Threapleton Idolized Wes Anderson. Then She Became the Breakout Star of His New Movie
If Mia Threapleton had to pick an avatar for her creative awakening as a kid, she might choose a fox. She could have gone with a lion, the animal she'd pretended to be during summer camps and after-school 'acting clubs' with her friends, and which gave her an early peek at the thrill of performing for others. Or maybe a 1930s gangster, courtesy of the childhood viewings of Bugsy Malone; Threapleton vividly remembers seeing a very young Jodie Foster, along with dozens of other kid actors pretending to be Prohibition-era hoods and molls in that 1976 movie, and thinking, How old is she? She looks like she's my age. Can I do that? I could do that. And there were also her parents, who… well, we'll get to them later. All of those figures factored into Threapleton's decision to mention in passing, during her preteen years, that she maybe kinda sorta wanna give the professional acting thing a try. But what really stands out in her memory is one particular fox. It didn't matter that he was just a stop-motion-animated animal. This mammal was witty, a dapper dresser, and a great dancer. Plus this mischievous creature had a lot of eccentric friends. And he seemed to move in a world that felt odd, funny, weird and unique in the best possible of ways. He was, dare we say, fantastic. More from Rolling Stone 'Highest 2 Lowest' Isn't Spike Lee's Best or Worst - Just a Chance to Watch Denzel Go HAM Wes Anderson Questions Logic Behind Trump's Movie Tariffs: 'It Doesn't Ship That Way' That Doc on Shia LaBeouf's Acting School Is Even Crazier Than You've Heard 'Yes, Fantastic Mr. Fox!' Threapleton says, with a machine-gun giggle. 'I remember seeing that movie when I was eight, maybe nine. And the impression I had was, 'This is so cool… Why do I like this so much?' I mean, it's a brilliant movie. But something about it really got me as a kid. It just felt so imaginative and fun. 'That was the first time I was aware of who Wes Anderson was,' she recalls, sitting in front of an open hotel room window overlooking the beaches of Cannes. 'Then a few years later, I saw Moonrise Kingdom, and I recognized his name. And it was like, 'Oh, this is great, too. I love this director! I love his style. I love everything that he's doing here.' It's amazing how his brain works. It's so unique, his sheer Wes-ness. All those Wes-isms are amazing. That movie became an important piece of cinema to me. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but I still watch it to this day. So, you know, when you go from that to, um, this….' She looks around the room, wide-eyed, and the staccato laugh returns. 'It's surreal. A little crazy, to be honest.' That seeing a pair of Anderson's movies was such a formative experiences for Threapleton — now that she stars in one of them — seems like a detail that might have been ret-conned into an origin story. But the 24-year-old British star of The Phoenician Scheme, the latest from the beloved filmmaker that's making its premiere at the Cannes film festival (and hits limited theaters on May 30th, before going wide on June 6th), swears it's true. And she's admittedly still swooning over the fact that she's stepped through the looking glass and somehow, after being so entranced by his work, has now become a cornerstone of a genuine Wes world. Threapleton plays Liesl, the only daughter of wealthy, infamous business tycoon Anatole 'Zsa Zsa' Korda (Benicio Del Toro). Having just survived that latest in a long series of attempted assassinations by his rivals, the industrialist has finally decided to get his affairs in order. Korda has declared that, because his nine sons are, frankly, nincompoops and rapscallions, Liesl will be the sole heir to his fortune. The one caveat: She must avenge his death should he perish. As for Liesl, she's a novitiate who pines for a simple life in a convent, and wants nothing to do with her estranged father. Still, when Korda asks her to accompany him as he secures financing for one last massive project, his daughter relents and trots the globe with her dad, along with a Swedish tutor named Bjorn (Michael Cera). As with most of Anderson's films, there's a who's-who ensemble cast (Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Benedict Cumberbatch, Willem Dafoe), sophisticated in-jokes and references, and the sort of meticulous mise-en-scène that's inspired rabid fandom among the film-nerd set. Threapleton, however, doesn't just hold her own against a lot of A-listers and an insanely detailed production design. She ends up being the film's secret weapon, courtesy of a less-is-more approach that makes her placid expressions and impeccable comic timing feel like she's channeling Buster Keaton. Told that this vast inheritance will change her life forever, Liesl replies with the world's most barely discernible shrug. It's the sort of perfectly deadpan grace note that compliments Anderson's sense of controlled chaos while giving you a sense of who this character is. 'It's interesting, because I feel like a lot of people would think the environment on his sets are very restrictive, very controlled — and it's not, actually,' Threapleton says. 'Wes loves naturalism, which I know is a weird sentence to say regarding him — but he loves naturalism. He loves nuance. He loves simplicity and subtle complexity in a scene. And while Wes knows exactly what he wants, the end result is kind of like this beautiful collage of moments that were sometimes worked out and planned, and sometimes discovered as we were filming.' She mentions one sequence early on in Phoenician, where a series of shoeboxes are spread out on the floor. Threapleton casually walked over in between shots and hovered over them, her hands on her hips. Suddenly, a head poked out from behind the monitor: Don't move, Wes said. Let's go one more time, but with you standing like that. 'That's the shot in the film. He's constantly paying attention in case something random or unplanned catches his eye.' Which is a good way of describing how Threapleton suddenly found herself meeting her cinematic idol-slash-future director in London, sharing tea and reading a few very select pages from The Phoenician Scheme's script. The actor was one of a gajillion other hopefuls with a few credits to her name — a recurring part on Apple's The Buccaneers, a prominent role in the BBC anthology series I Am…Ruth; more on that second one in a minute — that sent in a self-shot tape via an agent, circa May 2023. She had no real sense of what the project was, and how Liesl might fit in to a much bigger, immaculately composed picture. 'There was no 'more of this, less of that, hit this beat more,' she says. 'I just did what felt right, without any context. And it felt right to sort of underplay it.' According to Anderson, he'd already seen over a thousand other auditions by the time Threapleton's tape arrived. Something about hers immediately stood out. 'She just seemed like she was in a documentary about the scene,' the director says, via a voice memo sent from a post-Cannes-premiere jaunt to Milan. 'I could see her thoughts. You could tell she was really listening, reacting, thinking about what was happening in front of her. Which isn't always the case.' After Threapleton did a callback, she was invited to meet with Anderson in London. She was admittedly anxious over an encounter with the person who'd made two of her favorite movies, until he opened the door of his hotel room and, per her recollection 'he was wearing pink socks, hotel slippers, stripy linen trousers and a blue linen shirt with clear, quite small glasses. And I thought, Look at him! Oh, I'm not nervous now at all. Let's have some fun here.' Threapleton and Anderson proceeded to chat 'about everything but the movie: the world, our mutual dislike of social media, films that we admired, things that we enjoyed, books that we liked. A get-to-know-you kind of conversation. And then I think probably about the hour mark, we both sort of went, 'Perhaps let's do some acting now? I think we should?'' She and Anderson's friend, the writer-director-actor Fisher Stevens, read some scenes together. A few weeks later, Mia was asked to do a two-day screen test. She felt good. Then Mia was told it would be with Benicio Del Toro, who'd be playing her father. She felt sick to her stomach. 'It's the usual, 'Oh my god, I'm going to act against this person. Oh my god, I'm going to meet this person. Oh my god, I hope I don't look like a mess,'' Threapleton says, twisting in her seat at the memory. When Del Toro walked in on the first day of her test, she shyly introduced herself. He immediately gave her a handshake and a hug. 'Completely put me at ease. I realized, he's just this huge purring cat. Or maybe Benicio is like a big bear. A very big, very talented, very disciplined bear with an incredible sense of concentration. 'I think I've mentioned this in an interview before,' she adds, 'but at one point early on during filming, Benicio came up to me and asked, 'You good?' I replied, 'I mean, it's really happening now, isn't it?' And he just said, 'It's ok, we're going to do it together.' Then when he wrapped, I went up to give him a hug goodbye, and he said, 'See, I told you, we did it together.'' The second day, Threapleton says, involved hair, make-up and costumes — what Anderson calls 'a sort of mock up of what they might be like as the characters.' At one point, they were trying to put together Liesl's all-white habit together, and they couldn't find a veil. The outfit was not quite coming together. Threapleton spotted a napkin on a lunch cart. She asked: Does anybody have any hairpins? Then the actor pinned the napkin to her head, and voila. There was Liesl. By that point, however, she had already been cast. 'I don't think I've told her this, at least not officially,' Anderson says. 'But five minutes into that second day, she already had the part. And when you saw her read against Benicio… I mean, he's a very imposing figure, and about a foot and a half taller than Mia, for one thing. But if you were to say who seemed to have the power in the relationship in the scenes, you would tend to lean towards the nun.' (Apparently Del Toro's endorsement had been secured at the end of the first day; according to a BBC interview, after Threapleton left, the Oscar-winner turned to Anderson and said, 'She can go toe to toe… she may be short, but she's terrific.') Once Threapleton arrived on set after a few days of rehearsal with Del Toro and Michael Cera, she said she had to continually 'mind fuck myself because I'm working with those guys, and also Riz Ahmed, and Richard Ayoade, and Tom Hanks, and Brian Cranston, and it's like, wait, they are my coworkers? What's going on here?!' Still, it's not like Threapleton hadn't shared the screen with super-famous movie stars before, even so early into a promising career. And this is probably a good moment to return to the subject of her parents. Mia's father is the director Jim Threapleton. Mia's mother is Kate Winslet. The Titanic star had acted with her daughter in the aforementioned I Am…Ruth episode, playing a mom concerned over social media's effect on her child's mental health. When Winslet won a BAFTA for her role, Mia was sitting beside her; you can see her sobbing during the acceptance speech, after Mom thanked her costar/offspring from the stage. 'That whole experience was very intense,' Threapleton says, nodding. 'Everything was improvised, but the director [Dominic Savage] would direct us in different rooms, so when we both came in to do the scene, neither of us knew what the other one was going to do. It's so clever, because it made for such an electric — and sometimes, quite frightening at times — energy within the scene. But it was also organic, because we didn't have a plan. We had a plan of, like, where the scene was going, but we didn't know what the other one was going to say to get to that point. And sometimes Dominic would pull one of us aside and go, 'Yeah, more of that. Or, like, really push her body. Really piss her off this time.' It was extremely full-on.' 'It's funny, because I had no idea who her mother was,' Anderson admits. 'It was only after I'd watched Mia's audition video a few times and went to look up what else she'd done that I discovered: Wait, she's Kate Winslet's daughter? Then I went back and watched her video again, and I swear if you listen closely, you can hear someone doing an East London accent offscreen, playing the scene with her. Maybe I'm projecting here — I've never discussed this with either of them — but perhaps she worked with her mother on it. Perhaps she had the advantage of a very good collaborator. Again, I don't know for sure. But what that immediately told me was: She's open to collaborating. What I saw and heard when I rewatched it was someone working with another person to make a scene come to life, in a way that was absent from the thousands of other auditions. It impressed me even more.' Threapleton remembers the moment she told her mom that she was thinking about trying her hand at acting, and that the initial response was: ''I thought you wanted to be a marine biologist?' And the she said, Well, ok, it's hard work, but it's great work, go and do it. She recognized that I was serious, and also that I wanted to sort of do it on my own. And yeah — I kind of tried, fell down a bit, and sort of managed to make it happen. I mean, that's what been so amazing about it, in that I had a supportive environment and I had to find my own way. I wanted the experiences of it, the high points and low points, to be mine. Not someone else's. 'There was no guarantee, in other words,' Threapleton adds. 'So to be able to get work on my own, and then have that work be in a Wes Anderson movie, is…' Once again, her eyes widen. 'It's all very much a dream. I'm just taking this one day at a time. Talk to me after the premiere.' 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The Age
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The one piece of advice Kate Winslet gave her actor daughter
The first time it occurred to Mia Threapleton that acting was a job she might be able to do, she was seven years old. She was watching Bugsy Malone, a comic musical starring a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a Chicago gangster. 'I remember thinking: 'That looks really fun and she's really good and seems really cool. Is that something people can do that maybe I can do? Can I do that?'' A few years later, once she had realised that her lack of aptitude for maths probably ruled out becoming a marine biologist, she had made her decision. She told her mother she was going to be an actor. 'She said: 'Oh really? Well, if that's what you want to do, darling, definitely do it. It's very hard work'.' Which stuck in her mind, she adds. 'Because that's the only advice she's ever really given me. 'Read the script as many times as you can.' And 'it's really hard work'. And yes, it is, but that's why I like it.' It was reliable advice, given that Threapleton's mother is Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet. That was, however, as far as any stage mothering went. Her mother's career was not part of their family life; she had a home office, which was out of bounds, and a working life elsewhere. Threapleton, whose father met her mother when he was assistant director on her 1998 film Hideous Kinky, says she could count on her hands the number of times she visited a film set before she was employed on one. She was also in her teens before she realised her mum was properly famous. Even now, she hasn't seen many of Winslet's films. 'As I got older, kids sort of knew who my mum was,' she says. 'But no one ever commented. Sometimes they asked if I'd ever watched the car scene in Titanic and I'd say no.' When she was 12, she remembers, the film was playing on the family television. 'That was the only scene I ever remember her going 'Oh God!' and covering my eyes! And I remember turning round and saying, 'Mum, I can still hear it!'' Which was certainly a triumphant teenage riposte, but put an end to that family viewing. 'Till now, I've never seen that film all the way through,' she adds. 'It's a bit ewww, nah! But I honestly haven't watched very many things she's done.' She thinks about that, then name-checks Michel Gondry's 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 'That one is really an amazing piece of artistry, on every level.' In 2022, the pair appeared together in an episode of Channel 4's I Am... series, as a mother and daughter navigating the perils of social media. When Winslet won the BAFTA for best actress, she paid tribute to Threapleton, saying 'there were days when it was agony for her to dig as deeply as she did into very frightening emotional territory sometimes, and it took my breath away'. Threapleton knew that her mother had achieved her career on her own; she didn't have any strings to pull. She wanted to do the same. Once she had made her decision, she found websites listing auditions under her own steam and started putting herself forward for open castings. Looking back at the first few audition tapes she made, she sees how much she learned from that process. Loading 'It's sad not to get the jobs you really want, but it's fun in the first place and a great learning opportunity, to try new things and throw things at the wall and see what sticks.' She looked for an agent only in her last year at school. 'I really wanted to finish school, because I was very aware that this might not work out and I might need a contingency plan,' she says. 'Also, I needed to do it for myself.' The week after she finished school, her new agent sent her a script. 'I read it and I was excited. I was quite exhausted as well, because the second year of A-levels was really difficult for me, but I'd made it. So I said then right, now's the time to commit or it's going to be shit. That's kind of my life motto now. Commit or it's shit. I think that's actually something my mum said to me.' A couple of weeks later, she was on the set of her first film, an Italian-Irish co-production called Shadows, which was a thrill; she was so green that she didn't even know what a camera angle was. 'How I came to be where I am now was entirely me-oriented. Nobody pushed me ... Nobody said 'oh, you'd be good, you should do that'.' Where she is now – exactly now – is the Cannes Film Festival, due to walk the red carpet with celebrated director Wes Anderson and a cohort of stars who feature regularly in his quirky, stylised comedies of very elaborate manners. Threapleton plays a leading role in his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, as Liesl, the disaffected daughter of a ruthless business tycoon, Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio del Toro. Threapleton is still touchingly breathless at having worked with the stars Anderson regularly summons for his film-making summer camps, where cast and crew live and eat together for the duration of the shoot and Anderson sets out a table of films and books for them to watch and read as inspiration. They filmed at Babelsberg Studios and stayed in a hotel by one of Berlin's pristine lakes, going swimming on days off. At the dinner table, she might find Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch, even Tom Hanks. She couldn't believe, she said later, that she was there with Woody from Toy Story. Like Anderson's earlier film The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a story of unhappy families. Korda has just survived a sixth assassination attempt and decided it is time to hand over his empire to his only daughter, passing over his brood of witless sons. She will secure their fortune's future by pushing through his pet project, a vast real-estate deal in a developing economy that is being passed off as economically benevolent and environmentally responsible. Liesl wants nothing to do with it. For one thing, she hasn't seen her father in six years. And another thing: she's now a nun. In line with the rest of her self-driven career, Threapleton was chosen for the role on the basis of an audition tape, one of hundreds sent in response to a casting call. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Anderson said her reading stood out from a very large pack. 'She was clearly really thinking about every moment. She just seemed completely authentic,' he said. 'When you see the same scene played again and again and again by people who maybe aren't right for the part anyway, to have somebody who seems like she's in a documentary and she's interesting – this stops everything.' It might surprise fans of Anderson's arch, meticulously constructed meta-worlds to read that he wanted someone who seemed real, especially after seeing Threapleton as Liesl. When she isn't speaking, her face is set in an expression of mute resistance; her movements are not so much robotic as geometric, so that she seems to click into position. Her voice, uncannily like her mother's, is clear and clipped. She is like the most Andersonian character ever to be in an Anderson film, to the manner born. What she says Anderson wanted from her, however, was a kind of naturalism. 'When I did my first audition tape, I had a feeling of how I wanted to do it: in the way that makes the most sense to me. And that, it turns out, was what Wes wanted when it came to filming.' He would regularly tell her to be simple, more natural; on one occasion, he spotted her between takes standing with her hands on her hips and jumped out to tell her to hold that stance. 'It was just very casual, very matter-of-fact,' she says. He does a huge number of takes, she discovered; on the first day, when they just shot little extra moments, they did 69. 'And that turned out to be a middle ground. Because he knows exactly what he wants – and he's questing to find that. And then he finds new things as we go, so they get added in. It's quite orchestral, in a way. A bit more of this, less of that, then all together.' Liesl's ramrod back was one aspect of the character that came naturally to her. 'I stand up quite straight anyway because I'm five foot three, so everyone's taller than me. Her physicality and body positioning isn't actually dissimilar from my own. Her stillness and steadiness and precision: that was something that ended up happening after I had the costume on. Partly because I refused to sit down in it when we weren't filming. The material, I could see, was going to crease instantly.' Funny, that's just the kind of thing you would expect from her down-to-earth mother, concerned not to create more unnecessary ironing. The two women have a similar sort of boisterous physicality, too. As a child, says Threapleton, she wanted to be George in The Famous Five. 'I was forever climbing trees; my knees were filthy as a kid. And I wanted to have Timmy the dog! I do now have a dog, so I do feel like George. It's a little dream that came true, I guess.' Her mother would lead the charge on weekend walks, setting a cracking marching pace, through local fields or on trips further to the countryside. 'I now do that myself on a much more extreme level,' she says. 'I love that. That's my little escape. Long distance, camping, taking the dog for a week and just walking around different places. Having little adventures, finding the places where nobody goes. I'm really happy with my own company.' That cheerful confidence doesn't quite extend, however, to the formidable rituals of the Cannes Film Festival. We spoke before The Phoenician Scheme 's premiere, accompanied by the pomp and ceremony that this festival, more than any other, has preserved from a previous era. At least she would be walking the red carpet with a crowd, given that Anderson's team would all be there. 'It's terrifying, absolutely terrifying,' she said. 'But I will be fine, doing a lot of deep breathing and concentrating on not falling over my own feet going up those stairs.' Loading The first time she saw The Phoenician Scheme, she told Vanity Fair, she was able to see it alone in a theatre: a special screening for the star. She admitted that she cried all the way through. After the Cannes screening, as the camera covering the now traditional standing ovation was focused on each of the film's team in turn, we saw that she once again had tears running down her face. People were applauding; people were applauding her. She tried to wipe the tears away, but her face kept crumpling. And it was an emotional moment. For Mia Threapleton, stardom had arrived.
Sydney Morning Herald
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The one piece of advice Kate Winslet gave her actor daughter
The first time it occurred to Mia Threapleton that acting was a job she might be able to do, she was seven years old. She was watching Bugsy Malone, a comic musical starring a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a Chicago gangster. 'I remember thinking: 'That looks really fun and she's really good and seems really cool. Is that something people can do that maybe I can do? Can I do that?'' A few years later, once she had realised that her lack of aptitude for maths probably ruled out becoming a marine biologist, she had made her decision. She told her mother she was going to be an actor. 'She said: 'Oh really? Well, if that's what you want to do, darling, definitely do it. It's very hard work'.' Which stuck in her mind, she adds. 'Because that's the only advice she's ever really given me. 'Read the script as many times as you can.' And 'it's really hard work'. And yes, it is, but that's why I like it.' It was reliable advice, given that Threapleton's mother is Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet. That was, however, as far as any stage mothering went. Her mother's career was not part of their family life; she had a home office, which was out of bounds, and a working life elsewhere. Threapleton, whose father met her mother when he was assistant director on her 1998 film Hideous Kinky, says she could count on her hands the number of times she visited a film set before she was employed on one. She was also in her teens before she realised her mum was properly famous. Even now, she hasn't seen many of Winslet's films. 'As I got older, kids sort of knew who my mum was,' she says. 'But no one ever commented. Sometimes they asked if I'd ever watched the car scene in Titanic and I'd say no.' When she was 12, she remembers, the film was playing on the family television. 'That was the only scene I ever remember her going 'Oh God!' and covering my eyes! And I remember turning round and saying, 'Mum, I can still hear it!'' Which was certainly a triumphant teenage riposte, but put an end to that family viewing. 'Till now, I've never seen that film all the way through,' she adds. 'It's a bit ewww, nah! But I honestly haven't watched very many things she's done.' She thinks about that, then name-checks Michel Gondry's 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 'That one is really an amazing piece of artistry, on every level.' In 2022, the pair appeared together in an episode of Channel 4's I Am... series, as a mother and daughter navigating the perils of social media. When Winslet won the BAFTA for best actress, she paid tribute to Threapleton, saying 'there were days when it was agony for her to dig as deeply as she did into very frightening emotional territory sometimes, and it took my breath away'. Threapleton knew that her mother had achieved her career on her own; she didn't have any strings to pull. She wanted to do the same. Once she had made her decision, she found websites listing auditions under her own steam and started putting herself forward for open castings. Looking back at the first few audition tapes she made, she sees how much she learned from that process. Loading 'It's sad not to get the jobs you really want, but it's fun in the first place and a great learning opportunity, to try new things and throw things at the wall and see what sticks.' She looked for an agent only in her last year at school. 'I really wanted to finish school, because I was very aware that this might not work out and I might need a contingency plan,' she says. 'Also, I needed to do it for myself.' The week after she finished school, her new agent sent her a script. 'I read it and I was excited. I was quite exhausted as well, because the second year of A-levels was really difficult for me, but I'd made it. So I said then right, now's the time to commit or it's going to be shit. That's kind of my life motto now. Commit or it's shit. I think that's actually something my mum said to me.' A couple of weeks later, she was on the set of her first film, an Italian-Irish co-production called Shadows, which was a thrill; she was so green that she didn't even know what a camera angle was. 'How I came to be where I am now was entirely me-oriented. Nobody pushed me ... Nobody said 'oh, you'd be good, you should do that'.' Where she is now – exactly now – is the Cannes Film Festival, due to walk the red carpet with celebrated director Wes Anderson and a cohort of stars who feature regularly in his quirky, stylised comedies of very elaborate manners. Threapleton plays a leading role in his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, as Liesl, the disaffected daughter of a ruthless business tycoon, Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio del Toro. Threapleton is still touchingly breathless at having worked with the stars Anderson regularly summons for his film-making summer camps, where cast and crew live and eat together for the duration of the shoot and Anderson sets out a table of films and books for them to watch and read as inspiration. They filmed at Babelsberg Studios and stayed in a hotel by one of Berlin's pristine lakes, going swimming on days off. At the dinner table, she might find Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch, even Tom Hanks. She couldn't believe, she said later, that she was there with Woody from Toy Story. Like Anderson's earlier film The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a story of unhappy families. Korda has just survived a sixth assassination attempt and decided it is time to hand over his empire to his only daughter, passing over his brood of witless sons. She will secure their fortune's future by pushing through his pet project, a vast real-estate deal in a developing economy that is being passed off as economically benevolent and environmentally responsible. Liesl wants nothing to do with it. For one thing, she hasn't seen her father in six years. And another thing: she's now a nun. In line with the rest of her self-driven career, Threapleton was chosen for the role on the basis of an audition tape, one of hundreds sent in response to a casting call. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Anderson said her reading stood out from a very large pack. 'She was clearly really thinking about every moment. She just seemed completely authentic,' he said. 'When you see the same scene played again and again and again by people who maybe aren't right for the part anyway, to have somebody who seems like she's in a documentary and she's interesting – this stops everything.' It might surprise fans of Anderson's arch, meticulously constructed meta-worlds to read that he wanted someone who seemed real, especially after seeing Threapleton as Liesl. When she isn't speaking, her face is set in an expression of mute resistance; her movements are not so much robotic as geometric, so that she seems to click into position. Her voice, uncannily like her mother's, is clear and clipped. She is like the most Andersonian character ever to be in an Anderson film, to the manner born. What she says Anderson wanted from her, however, was a kind of naturalism. 'When I did my first audition tape, I had a feeling of how I wanted to do it: in the way that makes the most sense to me. And that, it turns out, was what Wes wanted when it came to filming.' He would regularly tell her to be simple, more natural; on one occasion, he spotted her between takes standing with her hands on her hips and jumped out to tell her to hold that stance. 'It was just very casual, very matter-of-fact,' she says. He does a huge number of takes, she discovered; on the first day, when they just shot little extra moments, they did 69. 'And that turned out to be a middle ground. Because he knows exactly what he wants – and he's questing to find that. And then he finds new things as we go, so they get added in. It's quite orchestral, in a way. A bit more of this, less of that, then all together.' Liesl's ramrod back was one aspect of the character that came naturally to her. 'I stand up quite straight anyway because I'm five foot three, so everyone's taller than me. Her physicality and body positioning isn't actually dissimilar from my own. Her stillness and steadiness and precision: that was something that ended up happening after I had the costume on. Partly because I refused to sit down in it when we weren't filming. The material, I could see, was going to crease instantly.' Funny, that's just the kind of thing you would expect from her down-to-earth mother, concerned not to create more unnecessary ironing. The two women have a similar sort of boisterous physicality, too. As a child, says Threapleton, she wanted to be George in The Famous Five. 'I was forever climbing trees; my knees were filthy as a kid. And I wanted to have Timmy the dog! I do now have a dog, so I do feel like George. It's a little dream that came true, I guess.' Her mother would lead the charge on weekend walks, setting a cracking marching pace, through local fields or on trips further to the countryside. 'I now do that myself on a much more extreme level,' she says. 'I love that. That's my little escape. Long distance, camping, taking the dog for a week and just walking around different places. Having little adventures, finding the places where nobody goes. I'm really happy with my own company.' That cheerful confidence doesn't quite extend, however, to the formidable rituals of the Cannes Film Festival. We spoke before The Phoenician Scheme 's premiere, accompanied by the pomp and ceremony that this festival, more than any other, has preserved from a previous era. At least she would be walking the red carpet with a crowd, given that Anderson's team would all be there. 'It's terrifying, absolutely terrifying,' she said. 'But I will be fine, doing a lot of deep breathing and concentrating on not falling over my own feet going up those stairs.' Loading The first time she saw The Phoenician Scheme, she told Vanity Fair, she was able to see it alone in a theatre: a special screening for the star. She admitted that she cried all the way through. After the Cannes screening, as the camera covering the now traditional standing ovation was focused on each of the film's team in turn, we saw that she once again had tears running down her face. People were applauding; people were applauding her. She tried to wipe the tears away, but her face kept crumpling. And it was an emotional moment. For Mia Threapleton, stardom had arrived.
BBC News
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Tributes paid to actress and BBC presenter Kathryn Apanowicz
Tributes have been paid to actress and broadcaster Kathryn Apanowicz following her death at the age of EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale star also presented shows for BBC Radio Leeds and BBC Radio was the partner of former Countdown host Richard Whiteley, with her death announced on Monday after a long on social media, Carol Vorderman, who appeared on Countdown alongside Whiteley, said: "Now, she will be with him again, at his side, where she was always at her happiest. Rest In Peace my friend." Apanowicz, who grew up in Leeds, played the role of caterer Magda Czajkowski in EastEnders during the late actress, who played Rose Butchins in BBC medical drama Angels, also featured in musical comedy Bugsy Malone as a child. Former ITV and BBC TV presenter Christa Ackroyd shared: "Reunited with her beloved Richard."I will miss you so much my lovely friend. What adventures we had. The world will always be a duller place without you."ITV Calendar presenter Ian White posted: "Kathryn was full of fun and positivity and a joy to spend time with. Always a hoot!" A BBC spokesperson said: "We are so saddened to hear of Kathy's passing, she was a hugely popular member of the team both at BBC Radio Leeds and BBC Radio York."Kathy was fun to work with, loved interacting with our listeners and will be greatly missed." Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
