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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.
“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 30, before going wide on June 6), 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 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 — who 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 co-workers? 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 co-star/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.”
