Mia Goth's Monster of a Moment

I meet Mia Goth in late August in Pasadena in a small park in the middle of the California Institute of Technology's campus. She selects a bench in the shade, fronted by a series of small ponds and encircled by buildings housing the genius minds of tomorrow. It is rather on the nose, I tell her, given the day's subject matter. She is the female lead in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, the celebrated director's 149-minute, $120 million three-decades-in-the-making passion project about a cursed inventor, and here we are, poised between the natural world and the ever-widening reaches of scientific exploration. Goth looks over her shoulder at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. "That did cross my mind," she says impishly. "Scientists…" Really, she says she chose this little park, with its boulders and terraced pools full of friskily scrumming turtles, because it doesn't feel like L.A. (more on that later) and because she comes here regularly with her 3-year-old daughter, Isabel. It's one of their favorite outings. "That's one of the beautiful things about having a child. … Things that you used to take for granted or you just weren't present for or just completely glazed over as an adult, she really slows down," she tells me. "This, if I was on my own, I might just look at it and appreciate it. Move on. Turtles. But with her, it becomes a whole morning." Goth is wearing no makeup (and not in the usual starlet no-makeup makeup way—really, none), and she is beaming. Parenthood, she tells me earnestly, "is the greatest gift of my life."

This, it must be said, differs wildly from Victor Frankenstein's experience—as written by Mary Shelley in her iconic 1818 novel and as depicted in del Toro's 2025 film, in theaters and on Netflix this fall. The director has taken some liberties with the text: his Dr. Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) has a cruel, demanding father, and transforms the sorrow of losing his mother, played for a few scenes by an unrecognizable Goth (truly, I triple-checked it with both Netflix and personal reps), at a young age into the determination to create life out of pieces of recovered corpses. He makes himself a parent too— just a really, really bad one. His repulsion by and abandonment of his creation (Jacob Elordi) results in a lot of unnecessary death and destruction. It's mayhem that could have been mastered by patience, understanding, and love—basically, good mothering (there’s a lot of Freudian emphasis on Victor's preference for milk) but also a sense of humanity. There is a reason this story has remained relevant for over two centuries and has found its moral lesson applied to everything from the French Revolution to the creation of and increasing reliance on AI: Just because we can do something, Shelley's work insists, doesn't mean we should.

Goth's real role in del Toro's film is playing Elizabeth Lavenza. In Shelley's novel, she is Victor's pure-hearted cousin and later wife, a benign victim who pushes the plot along. Here, the character is a refined young woman with a mind of her own who Victor finds himself inexplicably drawn to. (Could it be her uncanny similarity to his mother? There’s Freud again.) She is engaged to Victor's guileless and kind younger brother and has a deep-pocketed uncle (Christoph Waltz) who is willingly and increasingly entangled in Victor's experiments. Goth's Elizabeth possesses a genuine appreciation for science, specifically entomology, and a love of both the natural and metaphysical worlds. She has spent her most recent years in a convent. The part is basically the human embodiment of pure female virtue turned all the way up to Virgin Mary levels—all quiet kindness, grace, and maternal instinct wrapped in the halo of a cerulean-feathered fascinator that highlights Goth's eyes.

Goth spent time with some nuns in Alhambra, California, to prepare for the role, she tells me, and read the stacks of books that del Toro had given her (subjects: entomology; the book of Job; a biography of the 17th century Hieronymite nun, poet, and playwright Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz; a study of the fashions of the time). She also made a playlist, which she does for all of her film projects, mostly made up of scores by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, though she later decided she needed to break up all the "composer energy" with songs by Jeff Buckley, Beirut, Eve, Big Sean, and Mariah Carey. She found the most success when she'd meditate and try to channel a higher spirit. "I started to realize that actually when I get quiet and I'm able to sit with myself and get silent and really connect to the most authentic part of me, that's where she exists," Goth says.

Though she describes the shoot as magical ("I would have done anything Guillermo asked me to," Goth says with a "pinch me" air. "I never got over the fact that I was a part of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. I still haven't gotten over it"), the set was not a nonstop party. "I was taken by how focused and how quiet and how detail oriented the set was," she says. "I mean, everyone knew what time it was and what this represented and what it could be if we made it work. I guess, in that sense, there were parts of the job that were quite lonely." She often feels that the energy of the character and the story end up translating to the dynamic and the vibe of the set. She says, "I think just the nature of my character being a woman, the only woman, in a Victorian world is intrinsically lonely."

Goth believes all storytelling is, in some part, biographical, and she thinks there was a part of Shelley in all of these characters. At the time of writing Frankenstein, the 18-year-old Shelley had run away with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, just lost their out-of-wedlock child two years prior, and was pregnant with another. It was a period that The New Yorker, reviewing Muriel Spark's 1951 biography of Shelley, summarized as "eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss." Shelley was no stranger to the latter: Her mother, the writer, philosopher, and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, had died soon after childbirth, and her father, the political philosopher William Godwin, rejected her at 16 for her trespasses with Shelley. The impetus for Frankenstein came from a bored Lord Byron (who, it has been suggested, served as a fair amount of the inspiration for the impulsive and morality-challenged Victor and who himself impregnated Shelley's stepsister with a child he would effectively abandon a few years later). During a stormy weekend visit, he suggested a ghost story competition. Shelley's story became Frankenstein: a parable of man's genius perverted to folly, as expressed through the eyes of a hideous, powerful, innocent. (Ultimately, as is so often the case, the problem was other people; as Wollstonecraft had written in 1794, "people are rendered ferocious by misery.") "I thought a lot about [Mary Shelley] and who she was," Goth says. "At the core part of it, she was a very lonely woman. She created a friend in the creature," who, like all infants, didn't ask to be born and fumbles through the world looking for love and kindness and finds mostly cruelty and fear. "That's something that I was drawn to in the character," Goth continues, "this feeling of always feeling kind of an outsider myself."

***

Mia Gypsy Mello da Silva Goth was born in London in October 1993 into what she succinctly describes as "quite a hippie background." She moved with her mother to the latter's native Brazil in the early days of infancy, and a few years later, they joined her father in his native Canada. She and her mother permanently relocated to London when she was 12. To the consistent surprise of those who've only ever seen her in character on-screen, she speaks in a girlish lilt that betrays her British heritage but also feels slightly out of time. Some of her many devoted online fans have described her as sounding like a Victorian ghost.

The young Goth spent her early years watching the American movies that played on Brazilian TV in English, regardless of their subject matter or rating. She remembers 21 Grams, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Free Willy all leaving a positive impression. "I've always appreciated heavier, complex subject matter," she says. She would also visit her maternal grandmother—Maria Gladys Mello da Silva, a popular actress in Brazil—on various film and TV sets. "Some of my earliest memories are of being on set," she says. "I just remember thinking to myself, 'I want to do that' and looking up to her and just being in awe of her and what she was doing. It was kind of that way my whole life."

Goth's unique, doll-like look drew attention, and she started modeling and then auditioning when she was a teenager back in the UK. "It just always felt like [acting] was the path I was going to go down," she says. "I couldn’t explain it, and I didn't know how it was going to happen, but it just always felt like that's what was going to happen." Her big-screen debut was at 18 when she decided to forgo university to act in Lars von Trier's notoriously boundary-pushing X-rated erotic film Nymphomaniac: Volume II instead. Her parents knew von Trier's work and were thrilled for her to get the opportunity. "I couldn't have asked for a more supportive family in that sense, actually," she says.

Goth had no doubts herself about skipping college. There was never a plan B, she says, turning her gaze to the ground, where a nearby squirrel surveys, spread eagled in a patch of shade. "I always thought to myself, 'You can't have a plan B. You can't live your life like that because if you have a plan B, you're not going to work as hard on plan A. So you have plan A, or you're fucked.'" It's the first flash I've seen of the intensity she's known for in some of her grittier roles, the expletive delivered with the matter-of-factness of a punchline. (It isn't one. She's quite serious.) "I think I come from such a world where it was like my planning had to work," Goth continues. "I could never go back to what that was, so it just had to work. It just informed me in every way and my drive and how I'd show up for auditions, and I would be prepared for sets." The squirrel shoots up a tree trunk, and we both turn to watch it watching us, a ring of eyes staring at each other, waiting for the next move. She shrugs, "I just put all of my eggs in one basket."

Nymphomaniac was a foundational experience, and not only because it's where she met her now partner and the father of her child, actor Shia LaBeouf. "I love that movie. I'm very proud of that movie. It's still one of my favorite movies that I've been a part of," she says. Von Trier's set provided what "really became my whole blueprint for what I wanted my career to look like," she tells me: "the directors that I wanted to work with, the style of directing that I gravitate toward, the kind of films that I enjoy most, the actors that I really respond to. I think one of the reasons it was such an incredible experience was because it was so free. Lars would tell me, 'Go through the script, and if there's anything that doesn't sound right coming out your mouth, change it.' To give that to an 18-year-old that didn't have any experience was really empowering." Her CV quickly turned into a murderers' row of critically lauded auteur projects: A Cure for Wellness, High Life, Suspiria, Emma, X, Pearl, Maxxxine. Many of these (notably the X trilogy, the second installment of which, Pearl, she cowrote with creator Ti West) had small budgets and obsessive fandoms, for whom she quickly became their favorite star. They also tended to show off her excellent capability for elevating considered gore and talent for big, full, theatrical screaming. She doesn't love the oft-applied "scream queen" label, though. "Someone came up to me the other day, and they're like, 'Oh, you're one of my favorite actresses,'" she says. "I'm like, 'Oh, thank you!' And they're like '…in horror movies.' And I was like…"” She blinks and presses her lips into a thin, quizzical smile. But look, that's okay. That's unlikely to be the case for much longer.

Frankenstein is the biggest and most mainstream project that Goth has been a part of to date. That will remain true for a little under a year until Christopher Nolan's behemoth The Odyssey premieres next summer and she appears alongside what sounds like nearly every star in the Hollywood firmament. (Along with most details about the project, her exact role remains under wraps, though she does say that filming was "one of the greatest experiences," that Nolan was a master class in directing, and that she "learned so much on that film set.") Following that comes a new stratosphere or, really, galaxy: Star Wars: Starfighter, helmed by Shawn Levy and costarring Ryan Gosling. (It's a standalone project, she says, meaning they won't be inserting themselves into the universe's prior storylines, but that's really all she can say about it. Gosling has said that it is all new characters and takes place in a time after the Battle of Exegol, after Episode IX.) And then there's the next project, which has not even been announced, so mum's the word, though, she says earnestly, "It's the best thing I've ever read." Apologies to all of those who would prefer to keep her as their favorite indie horror actress, but what's happening now is a pointed turn to the very big time.

"I'm making a mindful decision of wanting to branch out and just not do the same thing," she tells me. "In any career, in any profession, you want to keep growing and trying new things. Otherwise, you just kind of get stagnant, and it's not fun anymore, and you're not exploring anymore, and it's just not enjoyable anymore." She gives too much of herself to each project to shoot things back-to-back-to-back; she prefers to go off and live her life and fill that well with experience so that she can draw from it later in her work. The key to having an interesting and fulfilling career, she tells me later, "is to cultivate a really fulfilling life outside of work so that you're able to have patience to wait for the right projects to come around."

To that end, she also has her 3-year-old daughter to think about. "I was always quite picky to begin with, but now even more so," she says. "It has to make sense on many levels. Oftentimes, you are waking up before she wakes up, and you're coming home after her bedtime. You have to justify it in your head to be away, for it to make sense, to be away from her, to be taken away from her. I feel very lucky that the projects that I'm working on [do] make sense to me." Isabel came with her to the Scottish Highlands to shoot some of Frankenstein, and they will relocate to London for Star Wars, which both she and Goth are excited about. "I miss London," Goth says. (She doesn't like L.A.? "I hate L.A.," she whispers.) "I miss my friends. I miss the people. I miss the culture. I just miss the sense of the city, being able to step outside and be around something." L.A. has been a fun place to raise a child with its easy weather and natural splendor, but she worries about the preteen years and how much quicker it seems the loss of innocence happens here thanks to the prevalence of social media, the exposure to the film industry, the emphasis on celebrity and money and the access to everything it can buy. "It feels like that awkward stage doesn't happen anymore," she says. "I feel like I was in my awkward stage until about 26."

We walk to a nearby café and chat about the prep she has to do before the Venice Film Festival in a week. There will be a facial and hair and nail appointments—the usual glam before takeoff. She doesn't fear or loathe the red carpet or summon a character beforehand in order to face it; she likes celebrating a project she believes in this much alongside the people who made it with her. Plus, the grandeur of Venice! And then there's the parenting part, getting Isabel ready for the trip. (Luckily, her daughter's favorite game is "airport": They pack suitcases, and a stuffed giraffe collects their tickets.) Inside where we wait for our drinks, there's inexplicably a life-sized cardboard cutout of R2-D2 by the cash register. When I point it out, she poses next to it, finger-gunning with a goofy smile like a tourist at Disneyland. (Sorry to disappoint R2 fans, but she says that particular droid is not one of her future costars.) None of the dozen-plus customers in line seem to clock that there's a movie star, let alone a future Star Wars star, in their midst. In her boxy white T-shirt, frayed jean shorts, kelly green Doc Marten brogues, and red socks, Goth looks every inch a cool young Pasadena native or fellow Caltech student. I ask if she often gets recognized. "Sometimes. Not a lot though. It's not to the point where it's uncomfortable or unmanageable," she says. In bigger cities around younger people, it happens more, but typically, they just want to say hi. "It's like living in a small town," she shrugs. Let's hope she's ready for it to get a whole lot bigger.

Photographer: Erica Snyder

Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen

Creative Direction: Sarah Chiarot

Hair Stylist: Bryce Scarlett

Makeup Artist: Nina Park

Manicurist: Betina Goldstein

Set Designer: Francis Cardinale

Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker

Producer: Luciana De La Fe