I am twiddling my thumbs in a hotel corridor, waiting for my interview with Mia Wasikowska, the new Alice.
At the royal premiere for Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton in 3-D, Wasikowska would be meeting the Prince of Wales. The nattering minders are concerned about how the 20-year-old Australian actress should address His Royal Highness, and how she should curtsy.
Through Burton’s looking glass, royal etiquette wouldn’t much bother this new Alice. As reimagined by the director and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, Alice is now 19, on the cusp of womanhood, bold and feisty. She questions convention and the roles society wants to impose on her - such as her impending and unwelcome marriage to an aristocratic twit. She is on her second trip down the rabbit hole.
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Only dimly aware she has been here before, she rediscovers familiar friends and foes – now sumptuous CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) characters, voiced and portrayed by British actors, including Matt Lucas as both Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Stephen Fry as the lugubrious Cheshire Cat and Alan Rickman as the smoke-enveloped, enigmatic Caterpillar. Alice faces down Helena Bonham Carter’s hysterical Red Queen, befriends Johnny Depp’s tragic Mad Hatter, tames the fearsome Bandersnatch and eventually slays the terrifying Jabberwock.
Such a liberal reinterpretation will doubtless upset some Lewis Carroll purists, but Wasikowska says it freed her to discover her own Alice. “It was life finding the person inside or underneath the iconic Alice,” she says. “Now she’s an older Alice, who is experiencing what many teenagers are experiencing – a kind of awkwardness, discomfort in your skin and in your society or among your peers, a feeling of isolation.”
Wasikowska had read Carroll’s books when she was a child, and reread them as she prepared for the part. “My other encounter with Alice was the Czech director Jan Svank-majer’s version, a stop-motion animated film, which is incredible,” she adds, in such a mild Australian accent that you could mistake her for English. “When we were kids, my mum would pop it in the VCR player. We would be disturbed, and wouldn’t really understand it, but we couldn’t look away because it was too intriguing. So I had kept that feeling about Alice, a kind of haunting feeling.”
As you can probably tell from the way Wasikowska (pronounced Vah-she-kov-ska) talks, she is thoughtful and articulate. Burton says that as he and the producers sifted through scores of possible Alices, it was her mature intelligence that intrigued him. “I always like it when I sense people have that ‘old soul’ quality to them,” he says. “Because you’re witnessing this whole thing through her eyes, it needed somebody who can subtly portray that.
Whatever that quality really is, it comes in part from Wasikowska’s slightly unusual upbringing in Canberra, the capital of Australia, sometimes thought of as a bit of a cultural desert. Her mother is a photographer, originally from Poland, and she made sure that Mia, her older sister and younger brother were introduced to European and other cultural influences when they were young. That had a huge effect on Wasikowska and her siblings, who all work in the arts now.
Wasikowska trained as a ballet dancer until she was 15, when she became disillusioned. She decided to change direction and become an actor. “I’d danced for many years, and I loved it,” she says. “But when I was 14 or 15, I was doing 35 hours a week, and it became so much about physical perfection that it kind of beats you down and grates on your self-esteem.
After getting her start in the Australian medical drama series All Saints, Wasikowska come to Hollywood’s attention when she played Sophie, a troubled teenager, in the HBO series In Treatment, which shows, in half-hour episodes, a psychotherapist (Gabriel Byrne) holding weekly sessions with his patients.
The accolades she received for her harrowing performance helped her to become the latest in what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of young Australian actresses to have conquered Hollywood.
Wasikowska got somewhat used to being in Hollywood when she was shooting In Treatment. Yet, like Alice, she says she still has to pinch herself to make sure she’s not dreaming when she’s on set with stars such as Depp, Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway, who plays the ethereal White Queen.
Wasikowska met Depp while they were doing camera and costume tests in preproduction. “He is everything you’d expect him to be: nice and kind and just an incredible actor. He plays these crazy characters, but he gives them this humanity and heart, which is what he has done with the Hatter.
“I felt like it was acting school, working with all these people. They make really brave choices. They showed me that, as an actor, you have to be prepared to do things that you could completely mess up, or that people may not like.
"But it’s much more interesting playing a character that’s not instantly likeable.” One such is Bonham Carter’s Red Queen, a deliciously dislikeable character, as prone to tantrums as a teething two-year-old, maniacal and bullying.
Wasikowska says it was fascinating to see the relationship between Depp and Burton, who have worked together on six feature films since they made Edward Scissorhands 20 years ago. “They have their own kind of language,” she says. “On the set, they have this push-pull thing. They keep each other in check, but they can also say just one thing to the other and know exactly what they mean.”
For her, the hardest part of making Alice was having to act, for the extensive CGI effects in the film, in front of a so-called “green screen”, often on her own. “When you’re acting with another person, you’re bouncing off their energy and you’re helping each other,” she explains. “When you’re acting with a tennis ball that is supposed to be the Cheshire Cat, you don’t know what the Cheshire Cat is giving you, so you’re having to pretend you know. It really meant a leap of faith, and having to trust Tim when he says things like, ‘Be a bit more angry with it.’ But it’s hard, because you’re really filming in a void.”
Wasikowska says she was enthralled when she saw the finished film, with all the CGI characters and their voices. “It was fascinating to see how they had integrated us into the picture so that we really looked like we were there, rather than pasted on top, which is often how it looks with CGI films.” But she doesn’t much like seeing herself on screen.
“It’s painful, a kind of traumatic experience thinking, ‘Oh, I should have done this or that differently.'"
Since finishing Alice in Wonderland, she has already shot another film, Restless, directed by Gus Van Sant, about a terminally ill girl who falls in love with a death-obsessed teenage boy. And she will shortly start shooting Jane Eyre, with Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester.
After that, although she will be much in demand, Wasikowska hopes to take a break: “I’m really lucky to do what I do, but it’s definitely something you need to take a step away from every now and then.”
Despite her burgeoning Hollywood career, she still lives at home, with her parents in Canberra, and sleeps in her childhood bed.
“I love going home,” she says. “It’s like leaving a different world behind and going back to exactly the way everything has been since I was a kid.”
(The Sunday Times Culture Magazine)
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