Mia Goth took Pearl’s unsettling smile to del Toro, Nolan and Star Wars

Mia Goth

Photo: LucaFazPhoto / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 25, 1993 London, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Odyssey, Frankenstein, Everest
Awards	Sitges Film Festival Best Actress · 2 Critics' Choice

At the end of Pearl, Mia Goth greets a husband home from the war with a smile she holds far past the point of comfort, a grin that keeps working long after the feeling behind it has drained away. That image is now the first thing most audiences attach to her, and it explains the odd position she occupies. Horror fans adopted her as one of their own; Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan have since cast her in films built for audiences of millions, and Lucasfilm has followed. Whether the mainstream wants the unsettling thing she does, or only the name that came with it, is the question her career is asking right now.

The restlessness starts early. Goth was born at Guy’s Hospital in London to a Brazilian mother and a Canadian father from Nova Scotia, and was taken to Brazil as a baby before returning to Britain at five. Her maternal grandmother is the Brazilian actress Maria Gladys; her grandfather, the American artist Lee Jaffe. From the age of ten she lived in Canada, where she went through nine schools in a single school year, and at twelve she settled in south-east London with her mother, a single parent who worked as a waitress.

The photographer Gemma Booth spotted her at the Underage Festival in London when she was thirteen, and Storm Model Management signed her. Campaigns for Prada and Miu Miu came before any acting. Her screen debut, while she was still a teenager, was about as unprotected as an entrance can be: a segment of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, the production on which she met Shia LaBeouf. For The Survivalist, a near-wordless drama set after a collapse, she has said she slept rough and lived on around 900 calories a day.

What came next reads like an apprenticeship with directors who want their actors exposed. Gore Verbinski cast her as Hannah, the young patient at the heart of the Alpine sanatorium in A Cure for Wellness. Luca Guadagnino made her Sara, the student who begins to suspect the Berlin dance company in his Suspiria, and Claire Denis sent her into deep space alongside Robert Pattinson in High Life. The counterweight was comedy. As Harriet Smith in Autumn de Wilde’s Emma., opposite Anya Taylor-Joy, she played guilelessness without a trace of irony, and was very funny doing it.

The turn came with Ti West. In X, a slasher about a small crew shooting an adult film on a Texas farm, Goth played two roles: Maxine Minx, the would-be star, and, unrecognizable beneath makeup, Pearl, the elderly woman who stalks her. West had been developing a backstory for the old woman with Goth, and while the pandemic was shutting productions down elsewhere, A24 let them shoot it straight after X wrapped, on the same New Zealand sets. Pearl credits Goth as co-writer and executive producer. Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars in The Guardian; David Rooney, in The Hollywood Reporter, compared her to Shelley Duvall. Her cry of “I’m a star” went on to a second life online as a meme.

Then the acclaim hit a ceiling. Pearl drew no Oscar nominations, and Goth did not pretend to be indifferent: the Academy’s attitude toward horror, she said, was “very political” and “not entirely based on the quality of a project.” The prizes she did collect, Best Actress at Sitges and two Critics’ Choice Super Awards, came from the genre circuit, and the scream-queen tag followed her into almost every profile. The label misreads her. Before X, her credits belonged to arthouse directors who cast her for stillness rather than screams, and Infinity Pool, Brandon Cronenberg’s resort nightmare in which she goads Alexander Skarsgård into ever worse behavior, pushed that discomfort further instead of repeating the slasher formula. MaXXXine, which closed West’s trilogy in 1980s Los Angeles with Goth also credited as producer, brought a different kind of shadow. A background actor, James Hunter, sued her for battery, alleging that she kicked him in the head during a take, and sued West and A24 for wrongful termination. All three deny the claims, and the case was still moving through Los Angeles County Superior Court in September 2026.

The studio phase began with Guillermo del Toro. His Frankenstein opened at the Venice Film Festival in August 2025 and reached Netflix that November, and in it she plays two women: Elizabeth Harlander, engaged to Victor’s younger brother and the object of Victor’s own fixation, and Claire Frankenstein, Victor’s mother, who dies giving birth to that brother. The film collected nine Oscar nominations. Goth earned an AACTA International nomination for supporting actress and shared a Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination with Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and the rest of the cast.

Christopher Nolan was next. In The Odyssey, released by Universal in July 2026 with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Goth plays Melantho, the maidservant who turns against the household. In Homer she is the servant who takes up with one of Penelope’s suitors, a small part inside the largest production Goth has ever worked on.

Her private life has surfaced in public only in fits. She and LaBeouf held a ceremony in Las Vegas in 2016, announced a separation two years later, reconciled, and had a daughter in March 2022. On October 6, 2026, Goth filed for divorce in Los Angeles County Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences and listing July 2025 as the date of separation; she is seeking primary custody of their daughter. Neither has commented publicly. She has long kept away from social media, and her public appearances now come mostly through her work as a Dior ambassador.

The biggest stage is still ahead. Lucasfilm confirmed her in the cast of Star Wars: Starfighter, Shawn Levy’s standalone film with Ryan Gosling, Matt Smith and Amy Adams, when shooting began in the UK in August 2025. The Hollywood Reporter has described her role as one of the antagonists, and the film is dated for May 2027. Alongside it sit two smaller, stranger projects without release dates: Fonda, Justine Triet‘s first English-language feature, in which she leads opposite Andrew Scott, and Hey Bear, Jonathan Krisel’s revenge comedy, in which she plays a widow who goes after the bear that killed her husband, played by Dan Stevens. A Star Wars film plays to the whole world at once. Goth’s best work has always depended on making a much smaller audience squirm in the dark, and the next two years will show whether she can do both.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Guillermo del Toro, The Odyssey, Mia Goth, Frankenstein, Ti West

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