Mia Tharia, Josie in Klara and the Sun, keeps playing the girl everyone watches

Mia Tharia

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	2005 London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actress

In both of the films that made her name, Mia Tharia plays the person someone else is watching. In Ariane Labed’s September Says she is July, the younger sister who lives under the stare and the orders of an older one. In Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, now reaching cinemas, she is Josie, the sick teenager whom Jenna Ortega‘s solar-powered android studies with something close to worship. Neither part is the loudest in the frame. The story turns on both.

It is an odd place to end up for an actress whose first instinct, by her own account, was to be the loudest person in the room. The casting director of September Says found her at Brixton Youth Theatre, in a crowd of teenagers improvising for her attention. “We were all trying to impress her and I went very overboard,” Tharia told i-D. “It was all these excitable kids and I wanted to come across as funny, but if you’re trying to be funny, you’re not funny.” She learned that before she had made a single film, and it explains much of what she has done since.

Mia Laura Tharia grew up in Balham, in South London, the daughter of an English mother who is a psychologist and a British Indian father who is a scientist, a job she summed up for i-D with a hesitant “…science?”. She was born in May 2005, went to Chestnut Grove Academy and calls herself, apologising for the cliché, a very shy child. Her parents had no connection to the industry, but they encouraged her early, with radio plays performed down the phone and theatre programmes that led to Brixton Youth Theatre and the Burnt Orange Theatre Company. In 2020 she reached the final of the Jack Petchey Speak Out Challenge after winning the Wandsworth round with a speech called “Warrior, Not Worrier”.

She writes as well. Burnt Orange chose her for its ZEST Writers’ Collective in 2024, she took part in the Royal Court Theatre’s Methods of Writing workshop, and she once staged a play of her own at her youth theatre, about the last day of Year 11. “It was so cringey,” she said, then switched to deadpan to claim it had started “a wave in the theatre world.” The writer’s habit of sitting back and observing is the one she brings to characters who are mostly observed.

Television came first. In 2023 she joined Phoenix Rise, the BBC Three drama about excluded teenagers making their way back into a Midlands school, as Polly Shah, a recurring role in the first two series with guest returns in the third and fourth. Then came September Says, Labed’s first feature as a director, adapted from Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters, with Tharia as July opposite Pascale Kann’s September and Rakhee Thakrar as their mother. It premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May 2024, and Vogue picked out the two young leads as rising stars of the festival.

July is the harder of the two sisters to play, because she barely acts on her own. “On the surface she can seem very timid,” Tharia said of her. “But there is this curiosity to her. She hasn’t known herself outside of her sister.” She framed the film’s question as one about leaving that shadow: “What does it mean to try and step into the unknown? Is it worth it? Or will it actually destroy you?” In November 2024 she played Ashley, the teenage daughter of Rebecca Hall‘s Claire, in The Listeners, Janicza Bravo’s BBC One adaptation of Jordan Tannahill’s novel about a teacher tormented by a hum almost no one else can hear. It was another house in which a girl watches an adult come apart. Screen International named her one of its Stars of Tomorrow that year, and Variety put her on its list of Brits to Watch for 2025.

The reviews behind those lists are less tidy. September Says divided its critics: the two leads drew praise, but several reviewers felt Labed’s cool, stylised direction, close in spirit to the films of her husband Yorgos Lanthimos, sat badly with the folk-horror suspense of Johnson’s novel. Klara and the Sun has fared far worse. After its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph each gave it one star, and its aggregate scores sit below 30 percent. Almost all of that argument is about Waititi’s tone and Ortega’s Klara; very few reviews spend a sentence on Josie. Ishiguro’s novel only ever sees Josie through Klara’s eyes, and the film keeps that distance, which leaves the actress playing its human centre largely unjudged in her biggest role so far.

She got the part after an audition she remembers as chaotic, forgetting her lines and ending up improvising with Waititi. Her casting was announced in February 2024 alongside Amy Adams as Josie’s mother, Chrissie, and Aran Murphy as Rick, the neighbour Josie loves, and the film was shot in New Zealand in the first months of that year under the working title Tears and Rain, with Natasha Lyonne and Steve Buscemi also in the cast. Sony then kept it back for more than two years. It premiered in London on 15 October 2026 and opens across the United States and Britain on 23 October, so the actress now promoting it was 18 when she shot it.

The film that may matter more for her is smaller. In The Education of Jane Cumming, directed by Sophie Heldman from a script she wrote with Flora Nicholson, Tharia has the title role: the India-born granddaughter of an Edinburgh aristocrat whose accusation against two schoolmistresses, Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie, set off the 1810 case that later inspired Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. Nicholson plays Pirie, Clare Dunne plays Woods and Fiona Shaw plays Lady Cumming Gordon. The film, inspired by Lillian Faderman’s book Scotch Verdict, was shot in and around Edinburgh in the spring of 2025 and had its world premiere in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival on 15 February 2026.

Jane Cumming turns the pattern of her career around. This time Tharia plays the girl who does the watching and the talking, and whose words decide what happens to two adults. After a studio film that critics would not forgive, the case for her as a lead will rest on this one, which Conic is due to release in British and Irish cinemas in early 2027.

Tags: actors, actresses, British cinema, Taika Waititi, Jenna Ortega, Klara and the Sun, Mia Tharia