Emma star Mia Goth on marriage, modelling and that Miu Miu campaign

Goth moved from London to LA when she was 19 to pursue acting following her staggeringly accomplished debut in Lars von Trier’s controversial erotic odyssey Nymphomaniac in 2013. The darkly comic and sexually explicit film divided critics, but Goth won high praise as the protégé of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s protagonist thanks to the effortless way she shifted from apparent naiveté to self-possessed menace. The performance was made all the more jarring by Goth’s adolescent appearance, a striking look that has made her a sought-after model by the likes of Prada and Vogue. While she still models, Goth has no qualms about calling it her ‘stepping stone’ to acting. ‘I’m grateful for what it gave me, which was an introduction to feeling comfortable in front of a camera,’ she says. ‘And it was good pocket money.’

In 2015 she found herself embroiled in controversy when a Miu Miu advertisement featuring her image was banned by the Advertising Standards Agency because it decreed ‘the ad presented a child in a sexualised way’. At the time, Goth was 22. ‘I was very taken aback by it, because I didn’t feel I was being exploited,’ she says. ‘I didn’t feel it came across in any way sexual at all. I was literally just sat in a room. It says more about the people who had an issue with it than the actual campaign, because in my eyes it was a beautiful piece of art.’

Since Nymphomaniac, Goth has burnished her reputation with a string of highly acclaimed art-house horror roles. She played a mysterious rehab patient in Gore Vebinski’s A Cure For Wellness (2017), a dancer dragged into a world of witchcraft in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria and a violent criminal imprisoned in space alongside Robert Pattinson in Claire Denis’ High Life (both 2018). After all that psychological torture comes something completely different: this month she’ll be seen donning a bonnet for a good old-fashioned period drama playing Harriet Smith opposite Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn and Bill Nighy in Autumn de Wilde’s faithful adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma.

The plot of Emma centres on the titular character’s ill-fated attempts at matchmaking, a somewhat outdated concept in the age of dating apps. ‘I think now everyone’s their own little Emma Woodhouse,’ says Goth. ‘With dating apps, they’re sort of matchmaking for themselves, so our film’s a form of escapism.’

She points out that in Austen’s day, marriage was as much about a financial arrangement as a romantic commitment. ‘Now marriage is more sentimental,’ she says, perhaps naively. ‘There aren’t the same economic pressures. In many ways it’s now more pure, because people get married solely for love rather than to make sure they get their pigs and sheep.’

Goth has some experience in this area. In 2016 she married her Nymphomaniac co-star Shia LaBeouf, who was by then as famous for provocative performance art as he was for acting. The couple filed for divorce two years later. At the time, their wedding became tabloid fodder when a livestream of the ceremony in Las Vegas — officiated by an Elvis impersonator, naturally — was picked up by TMZ. Goth doesn’t discuss her dating life, but will say that she tries not to let the intrusive side of celebrity affect her. ‘That’s not real at all,’ she says. ‘I think as an actor you want to have as normal a life as possible, because the more grounded you can be the better your work is going to come out. The right directors aren’t drawn to that anyway. I don’t think Claire Denis is looking at TMZ.’

For the characters in Emma, marriage is a function of class and social status. Goth, who describes herself as ‘working class, and very proud of that’, had an itinerant upbringing. Born in London to a Brazilian single mother, she was just two weeks old when they moved to Brazil. Her first awareness of acting as a career came from visiting film sets with her maternal grandmother, the film-and-television actress Maria Gladys, but her mother moved her back to Britain when she was five. When she was 10 the pair went to live with Goth’s Canadian father, an ice-truck driver in Nova Scotia, but it proved to be an unhappy period during which she attended seven schools in a single school year. Goth and her mother returned to London when she was 12, and she spent her teens bouncing around Catford, Lewisham, New Cross, Sydenham and Brockley.

‘My mum was a waitress my entire life,’ she says. ‘It was just me and my mum growing up. It wasn’t always the easiest, but…’ She pauses for a long moment, fiddling with the cap of a water bottle as she searches for the right words. ‘In terms of empathy and compassion, especially for my characters in what I do now, I think it’s helped me immensely,’ she says finally. ‘I went to Sydenham girls’ school, a state school not a private school, and all different walks of life went there. There were girls getting pregnant at 15, and others whose parents were upper-middle-class doctors. That social structure was an immense education. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.’

Goth describes herself as a ‘very studious’ child who always wanted to act despite limited opportunities. ‘My school wasn’t really focused on that,’ she says. ‘The drama department for GCSE was a little shack that had raindrops constantly pouring in. We weren’t putting on West Side Story.’

She discovered partying while still a young teenager. ‘We’d go to raves in Peckham,’ she remembers. ‘I feel as though I grew up in the last age of innocence, on the cusp of social media. We were still into MySpace. I had a phone you still had to put credit on. We were at the precipice of the entire world changing.’

Her own world changed when she was 14 and she was spotted at Underage Festival in Victoria Park by Gemma Booth, a fashion photographer whose work has appeared at the National Portrait Gallery. Goth signed with Storm Model Management but made clear that what she really wanted to do was act. ‘I started going for auditions when I was 16,’ she says. ‘I was doing that for a couple of years, then flew to Copenhagen to meet Lars and audition for Nymphomaniac. Three weeks after finishing sixth form, I got it.’

The then-18-year-old Goth had to audition naked for Von Trier for a role that sexualised her from the very start of her career, but she strongly dismisses any suggestion that the changing climate engendered by the #MeToo movement might make her look back at that experience differently. ‘No, not at all,’ she says, sharply, determined that her agency in the matter not be discounted. ‘I’ve been a huge Lars von Trier fan for a very long time and I knew the scope of what I was auditioning for. Everything I did was completely with my own intent.’

She describes having Von Trier direct her first performance as ‘a blessing’. ‘He’s not concerned with any of the intellect that can go into movie-making,’ she explains. ‘He’s all about feeling. He would say: “Just go into the room and see what happens.” I felt so safe.’

Goth felt similarly grateful to win a role in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, the Italian director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Call My By Your Name. She has just worked with him again on a short fashion film for Valentino called The Staggering Girl, about a writer (played by Julianne Moore) returning to her Italian home and the ghosts of her past. Goth calls Guadagnino ‘a visionary’ and is happy to be referred to as a muse for him and others. ‘I take it as a compliment,’ she says. ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that term. It’s very flattering.’

Now settled in the hip LA neighbourhood of Los Feliz, Goth’s raving days are behind her. ‘I’m quite a sensible person,’ she says. ‘I like to go to bed around nine and wake up at six. I made granola last night, that’s what I do with my evenings.’

Her tranquil home life contrasts with the ‘nomadic’ nature of film-making. She recently returned from Croatia where she was shooting Mayday with Juliette Lewis and first-time director Karen Cinorre. Set for release later this year, Goth plays the leader of a group of girls on an island in what she calls a ‘female Lord Of The Flies’. She’s keen to explore new genres, and doesn’t entirely shoot down my suggestion that she might one day star in a romcom. ‘It depends who’s directing it,’ she says. ‘If we can get Ken Loach, I’m in.’

She hopes her latest film will help audiences — and directors — see her differently. ‘I think Emma will probably surprise some people in terms of my range as an actor,’ she says. ‘I’m definitely not just a spooky actress who’s drawn to peculiar projects for peculiarity’s sake. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I know I have a lot more of myself to show the world.’

With that we walk outside to her car and she drives home under purple skies to her waiting granola. We’re a long way from leaky school halls in Sydenham, but I’ve never seen a Goth look more at home in the limelight.

‘Emma’ is out 14 February

Photography by Amanda Charchian

Styled by Henna Koskinen