Growing up, Mia Wasikowska knew the story of Alice in Wonderland. But unlike most children, she was best acquainted with the version by experimental Czech director Jan Svankmajer, Alice. The macabre 1988 movie, which costars a young girl and a taxidermied rabbit, made a deep impression on Wasikowska and her siblings when their mother popped it into the VCR. “We used to be kind of disturbed by it,” recalls the 20-year-old Australian actress, best known Stateside for her role on HBO’s In Treatment. “But we could never walk away, because it was so fascinating and odd.”
Those same words could also describe the films of director Tim Burton, whose upcoming version of Lewis Carroll’s eternally surreal tale stars Wasikowska in the title role. “There is a lot of pressure,” acknowledges the actress during a brief visit to Beverly Hills from the Portland, Oregon, set of Gus Van Sant’s as-yet-unnamed next film, for which she cropped her long hair to play a death-obsessed teenager in love. “Alice is such a dear character to so many people that you have a responsibility to deliver something that people know but that’s also unique and different. It’s Tim’s Alice. It’s also my Alice.”
As if the challenge of inhabiting one of the world’s most famous female characters opposite costars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter weren’t enough for the relatively inexperienced actress, Burton’s effects-heavy vision for the film required much of the 14-week shoot in England and Los Angeles to take place in front of an otherworldly green-screen set. “That’s a really weird way to work,” says Wasikowska, who often found herself interacting with inanimate objects standing in for her costars. “For a lot of scenes, there would be no one there and I’d be acting with tennis balls and sticky tape.”
“Alice is always portrayed as a precocious girl wandering through weird environments,” says Burton. “Our goal was to give her more of a grounded quality. That’s what Mia brought to it. Meeting her, it’s clear how intelligent she is and that she has a rich internal quality.”
Wasikowska had a somewhat bohemian upbringing in Canberra. Her Polish mother and her Australian father, both artists, live together but have never married—Wasikowska uses her mother’s surname—and from a young age she traveled with her parents on their gallery rounds in Europe. Wasikowska’s first love was ballet, and she studied dance seriously, with the dream of going professional. But by age 14 she had burned out. “That was, in a way, my first career,” says Wasikowska, who still has a ballerina’s slight frame, which today is wrapped in an oversize cardigan. “The thing I took issue with was having to have the perfect body. There wasn’t any room for fault or imperfection. Film is a lot more about life, and so it’s all about the things we do that are imperfect. That really interested me more.”
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