Mia Goth

Mia Goth: ‘I’m always scared of feeling like a fake’

She was naked in Nymphomaniac and didn’t wash for The Survivalist. The model-turned-actress explains why she wants roles that go for grit

Mia Goth

ALEX GODFREY
MONDAY 8 FEBRUARY 2016

M

ia Goth hasn’t showered for five weeks, she announces with delight. We’re in Belfast, uncomfortably cold on a disused RAF base, where The Survivalist, Northern Irish director Stephen Fingleton’s stark, taut drama about post-societal collapse, is nearing the end of its shoot, and the crew is breaking for lunch. I wish I could tell her she stinks, but, sadly, she does not. “I do,” she insists, dragging on a fag like it’s her first in months. “My armpits, trust me. And my feet. But I’m young, so sweat dribbles off.”Young actors don’t often tell journalists of their underarm odours. Goth, though, is more free-spirited. She’s led a nomadic life, so it’s fitting that her parents called her Mia Gypsy (Mia Gypsy Mello Da Silva Goth is the lot). Born in south London, she moved with her family to Rio, and then to a farm in Canada, but returned to London for school. She started modelling during her A-Levels, and you can see why agencies love her: the barely-there eyebrows, the transfixing eyes, the ethereal, almost alien face.

Alongside Cara Delevingne and Agyness Deyn, Goth is the latest model to have sidestepped into acting. Unlike most who came before them, this lot are magnetic, naturalistic performers – from the Milla Jovovich school of model-turned-actor as opposed to, say, Heidi Klum in Blow Dry. In Goth’s two most substantial roles, The Survivalist and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, she has been cold, tough and manipulative, without having to say much at all. It’s much more fulfilling than posing in some nice clothes.“Modelling is very two-dimensional, you really don’t have to bare anything,” says Goth, whereas “a lot of acting is having the courage to reveal your emotions and your fears and your soul.”

She did, however, enjoy working on a Miu Miu campaign which got banned in the UK for potentially giving the impression that it “presented a child in a sexualised way”. Goth, reclining on a bed, fully clothed, was 22. “I thought it was a little silly: that anyone could ever receive that as being a photograph that undermined me as a woman,” she says. “I wasn’t really bothered. It was kind of cool to have worked with [photographer] Steven Meisel on something that was banned. I felt like a little rock star.”

Similarly, she took great pride in being part of Von Trier’s graphic sexual odyssey Nymphomaniac. She broke though as criminal protege “P”, indulging in plenty of callousness and abusive urination, often without any clothes on, along the way. “I’m drawn to roles where someone has to struggle or fight,” she says. “That’s more interesting to me. I feel that sometimes with [other] female roles, real feelings are diminished.”

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 Mia Goth with Olwen Foere in The Survivalist.

Goth is also less concerned with that other spurious aspect of being a model-turned-actress: celebrity. She has dated fellow actor Shia LaBeouf since they worked together on Nymphomaniac, and she lives in LA, making her prime TMZ fodder. But she turns a blind eye to paparazzi and, unlike most rising stars, has no social media presence. “If actors are drawn into all of that,” she says, “then ultimately they’re just compromising their craft and getting further away from who they are, really and truly.”

Mia Goth

And you can’t argue that Goth doesn’t take that “craft” seriously. She happily auditioned nude for von Trier and went to extremes of a different kind on The Survivalist. For the latter film, where society has disintegrated, there’s little food, and it’s everyone for themselves out in the woods, the cast went on starvation diets 10 weeks prior to the shoot. Goth plays Milja, a young woman who embarks on a relationship with a man (Martin McCann) after initially bartering her body for food. Not only did she not shower or shave, she slept outside for the duration of the shoot, which would explain her supposed stench.

Catching up with the Guide on the phone a year-and-a-half later, she explains how it felt to temporarily abandon clean living: “Everything was a lot tougher than I imagined. To do this film justice, you had to go all the way. I’m always super scared of feeling like a fake.”

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 Mia Goth with Charlotte Gainsbourg in Nymphomaniac. Photograph: Christian Geisnaes

Somehow, fake feels like the furthest thing away from the roles that Goth chooses. She liked the duality of Milja’s “struggle of living in this really vicious world” and also how she was “going through the growing pains of developing into a young woman”. Milja also doesn’t need a male hero to survive, and is in full control of her actions.

“So often in films there are two ways a female can be portrayed: either innocent and virginal or the complete opposite,” she says, determinedly. “It’s biblical: the Virgin Mary, and the slut of the Earth. You never have the middle ground, and I was really keen to portray a realistic, honest approach of who I think a young woman would be in this situation – strong and independent.”

THE GUARDIAN

Interview

Sissy Spacek: ‘I was fearless’

Alex Godfrey
Thu 19 Mar 2015

Sissy Spacek has been away. She disappears often. Since making it big as one of the golden girls of 1970s Hollywood, she has been a fan of the hiatus, frequently leaving the limelight to take stock, to enjoy life on her Virginia farm, and to raise her kids.

Now, in her first role since 2012, Spacek is about to star as Sally Rayburn, the matriarch in Bloodline, the new thriller series from Netflix. So what’s she been up to? “Family and animals,” she beams, sparky and exuberant as she sits on a sofa in a London hotel. “I need to fill myself up with real life. That’s kind of the well I draw from. Though this show has been a wonderful experience: I’m exploring my seventh decade with this role.”

Spacek, now 65, has been acting since 1972. Even back then, she was always careful about what parts she agreed to, finding immediate success as Holly Sargis, the teenager who runs away with a psychopath in Terrence Malick’s Badlands. By 1976, she had become an icon, thanks to Brian de Palma’s Carrie, which she followed with an appearance in 3 Women, directed by Robert Altman. After that, she didn’t make a film for three years. When she returned, to play Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter, she won an Oscar.

Decades later, she’s still a great actor, bringing grace and weight to Bloodline, in which she plays wife to Sam Shepard and mother to four combative middle-aged kids. A taut family noir co-created by Todd A Kessler, a writer and producer on The Sopranos, Bloodline is set in the forests and wetlands of Florida Keys where the Rayburns run a picturesque hotel. When their eldest son Danny returns home, old wounds are ripped open and the façade falls away from his not-so-squeaky-clean siblings, all of whom are desperate for their parents’ affection.

“I think they’ve just put things away and moved on,” Spacek says, of the past traumas that lie at the heart of Bloodline, “rather than address them and have them be alive in their lives.” It’s a scenario that has parallels with her own family background. Her older brother Robbie died from leukaemia when she was 17. “For me, the grief was almost like rocket fuel,” Spacek wrote in My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, her 2012 autobiography. Having grown up a tomboy in the small Texas town of Quitman, she left for New York to hang out with her cousin, the actor Rip Torn, became a singer and then an actor. How did her brother’s death influence her acting?

“I think it made me brave,” she says. “Once you experience something like that, you’ve experienced the ultimate tragedy. And if you can continue, nothing else frightens you. That’s what I meant about it being rocket fuel – I was fearless in a way. Maybe it gave more depth to my work because I had already experienced something profound and life-changing. It was a devastating blow but it became a real positive. I grew so much and it was definitely because of my mother. She wanted all of us to be better through what we had experienced – and not be devastated by it. Something like that can propel you or it can be a black hole that sucks all the life and air out of the room. And I think the Rayburns, and particularly Sally, don’t have the tools to understand that.”

Danny is played by Ben Mendelsohn, the Australian whose recent roles in the likes of Animal Kingdom, The Place Beyond The Pines and Starred Up have established him as something of a firecracker, an actor with a dangerous unpredictability, all of which makes him perfect for this new part. Like Spacek, Mendelsohn is no stranger to family upheaval. His parents divorced when he was six and he later went a little off the rails, finding himself expelled from boarding school at the age of 13 for, as he says cryptically, “burning stuff”. He became an actor, finding the family he lacked in the Australian film industry.

Sissy Spacek with Ben Mendelsohn as her eldest son in Bloodline.

Danny has a brother called John, a seemingly upstanding figure played by Kyle Chandler, whose reasons for taking up acting aren’t dissimilar to Mendelsohn’s. After ending a five-season spree as coach Eric Taylor in US football drama Friday Night Lights, Chandler worked his way through small but meaty roles in Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and The Wolf of Wall Street. Bloodline, he says, appealed to him from the start. He grew up in Georgia, enjoying an idyllic childhood until, at the age of 14, his 56-year-old father died of a heart attack. For a couple of years, he fell into a life of drink, drugs, car crashes and arrests, getting into acting in a bid to find new father figures.

Is he still searching? “Yeah, I think so,” Chandler says. “Now that I have kids, I look at them and think about our relationship. I see things I missed out on when I was younger and could have used help with. There was something missing when I was a kid. I didn’t have a father to guide me. I had to figure those things out for myself. I was a pretty insecure kid and became somewhat introspective. I looked at other people to see how they fitted in, I was more observant of life around me. Once I got into acting, without realising it, I had a pretty good grasp of how to take all those pieces I had in my memory and use them in acting. It’s odd, too, because my dad used to call me a faker when I was a little kid all the time. I often think about that.”

As for Spacek, she lives for family these days, priding herself on being an ordinary girl with roots in smalltown Texas. But there’s no denying her otherness, her ethereal beauty. Somehow she manages to exude an air of purity, gliding about on screen with hypnotic oddness. Spacek has never bowed to Hollywood pressures. After playing Loretta Lynn, she received a telegram from Dolly Parton, reading: “Dear Sissy, I hope you make millions of dollars from Coal Miner’s Daughter so that you can get a boob job and do the Dolly Parton story.” Needless to say, there was no boob job.

We talk more about her Hollywood hiatuses. I’d read a 1979 interview with her by Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone. At one point, Spacek’s father takes Crowe out on a boat and confides his concerns about his daughter. I read out his quote: “We’ve been worrying a bit about Sissy lately. She’s passed on so many projects, you know. Rip is an actor who has mouths to feed, like many of them. He admires Sissy for being able to hold out. But he worries for her, too. We don’t want to see her lose what she’s built up to.”

Spacek’s eyes light up as she remembers her time with Crowe, and she’s happy to explain why she’s never been afraid to disappear for years on end. “Maybe I was naïve,” she says with a smile. “I just thought it would always be the way it was. Maybe it’s because I became involved with a young artist who I later married, Jack Fisk, and we had this plan to live the art life. But also, my cousin Rip told me early on, ‘I hope you’re doing this for the right reasons. If you’re doing it because you wanna see yourself huge on the screen, that’s the wrong reason. But if you’re doing this because you are interested and you love the work, you’ll have a happy life.’ That was some of the best advice I ever got. And because of losing my brother I didn’t have fear. The world was my oyster. And also, maybe, ignorance is bliss.”

THE GUARDIAN