The Making of Mia Goth
Cape, corset, Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda. Earclip, Tiffany & Co.
It’s Mia Goth’s voice that gives her away. High and lilting—particularly when she’s nervous, as she is now—it sharpens her British accent, making her sound younger than her 32 years. On an August afternoon in Pasadena, where Goth has asked to meet on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (she often takes her 3-year-old daughter, Isabel, here to feed turtles), the horror-film star looks more like a fellow undergrad than the rumored villain of the next Star Wars movie. “I’m very surprised to see you,” says an applied physics student named James, who approaches Goth to ask for a photo. Together, she and I surmise it was likely her voice he recognized first. With a hint of dismay, Goth calls it “mouselike.” Her fans, meanwhile, point to her inflection as yet another similarity between Goth and the late actress Shelley Duvall, herself a famously soft-spoken horror-film legend.
In person, Goth bears little resemblance to Pearl or Maxine, her murderous characters in Pearl, X, and MaXXXine, the A24 horror trilogy from director Ti West that has, since 2022, catapulted her to stardom. Wearing a white T-shirt and denim cutoffs, she has paired red socks with green Dr. Martens mules, giving her a slightly elfin, festive effect. The only signal of her movie-star status is the Dior bag sitting beside her iced Americano. (She is, after all, a newly minted ambassador for the house.) As we talk, her voice settles, dipping into a more even register. “The more you get to know me, the deeper it gets,” she says. Then, as if to explain, she adds, “I think [the high voice] is a response to anxiety, a little bit....This is hard.”
Coat, feather bodysuit, pants, Balenciaga Couture.
Cardigan, Hodakova. Skirt, Alaïa. Shoes, Repetto.
Goth is on the precipice of a transformational moment: a shift from small-but-mighty genre films to mega-mainstream cinema. This fall, she stars alongside Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi in Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein. She’s also recently wrapped production on Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, coming in 2026. Through December, she’ll be in and out of London, filming 2027’s Star Wars: Starfighter with director Shawn Levy and co-stars Ryan Gosling and Matt Smith. Then, of course, there’s Marvel Studios’ long-delayed Blade reboot, to which Goth confirms she’s still attached. (She has no update on the film’s beleaguered production, saying only, “It’s for the best that it’s taken the time that it has. They want to do it right.”)
I ask if stepping into a bigger, broader spotlight scares her, or if she’s intimidated to be working with some of the most in-demand names in her industry. “It’s given me a lot of strength, actually,” she says. “To trust myself, to be a little less scared of the world. It’s empowering, having the opportunity to work at this level.”
Coat, feather bodysuit, Balenciaga Couture.
Goth prefers the northeastern enclave of Pasadena, where she’s lived since 2021, to the rest of Los Angeles. It’s quieter here, allowing her and her family a sliver of privacy. But she confides that she misses London, where she was born in 1993: the tea, the gray skies, her old friends. Of the many places she’s lived, it feels the most like where she belongs.
The daughter of a Brazilian mother and Canadian father, Goth was given the name Mia Gypsy Mello da Silva Goth. When she was still a newborn, her 20-year-old single mother brought Goth to Brazil to live with her maternal grandmother, the actress Maria Gladys, who was the first to expose Goth to a film set. From that point forward, she knew she wanted to act, and it was through acting that she learned to cope with her transient childhood. When she was 5, her mother—who worked as a waitress for much of Goth’s childhood—moved them both back to London, only for the pair to uproot themselves again a few years later for a stay in Nova Scotia, where Goth’s father was based as an ice-truck driver. The stint proved rocky and disorienting, with Goth bouncing around seven schools in a single academic year.
Dress, headpiece, Les Mauvais Garçons. Earclips, brooch, Tiffany & Co. Tights, Calzedonia. Shoes, Repetto.
Men’s jacket, Dior. Gown, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Necklace, Tiffany & Co. Stylist’s own T-shirt.
During that period, she found herself fabricating stories about her background, telling classmates that her mom was a brain surgeon or that she was a descendant of Vincent van Gogh. She’d pore over IKEA catalogs, selecting bedrooms and kitchens to fill the homes of fictional characters she created in her mind—“alter egos,” she calls them—to cope with the reality of her childhood. “There was this scarcity mind frame,” Goth explains. “We were going from one place to another, but nothing was ever really ours and nothing was ever permanent. And I was so desperately yearning for a home.” The stories she made up seemed safer. They felt like acting; they felt like play. “I think they made me feel more in control, as though I wasn’t just a passenger to the situation that was taking place. I can talk about it now because I’m so removed from it. But at the time, there was a lot of shame.”
At last, when Goth was 12, she and her mother resettled in London. Two years later, while attending a music festival in Victoria Park, she caught the eye of fashion photographer Gemma Booth, who helped Goth launch her modeling career. By the time she was 18, she secured her first acting role, in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. II, a job she landed mere weeks after finishing English secondary school.
“I saw acting as a way to get out of the situation I was in. That’s really what made me work as hard as I did. It was my driving force.”
“I saw acting as a way to get out of the situation I was in,” Goth says. “That’s really what made me work as hard as I did. It was my driving force.” She vocalizes her interior monologue as a teenager: “ ‘If this doesn’t work, then I’m going to go back to that, and I can’t let that be. So this needs to work. There’s no plan B. I have to do whatever it takes to make this scene good, to make sure that I’m good enough as an actor.’”
Goth declines to elaborate on her relationship with her parents today, though she mentions her father is a Star Wars fan and is hoping for her to host him on the Starfighter set this fall. And now that she, too, is a mom, Goth says she “definitely has more empathy” for her own mother’s struggles. “For a long time, I would’ve done anything to have changed the situation I was in,” she says. “But, now, looking back on it, I’m proud of what I come from and what we went through and that we were able to survive that. I wouldn’t change any of it.”
Top, bra, skirt, Marc Jacobs. Earclips, clip, Tiffany & Co.
Today, she’s wary of calling Pasadena her home. “More than anything, I’d say my daughter is my home,” she says. Goth is fiercely protective of Isabel, the child she shares with fellow actor Shia LaBeouf. For Isabel’s well-being as much as her own, the actress wants to reconcile the feelings of displacement that still dog her. “It’s something that I’m trying to work through and understand more deeply, so that it’s not something I give to my daughter,” she says. “If you feel comfortable within yourself, you’re going to feel good anywhere. Because wherever you go, you’re going to be confronted with yourself eventually.”
Goth makes it clear from the beginning of our conversation that while she’s happy to talk about many aspects of her life, “what I don’t want to talk about is Shia LaBeouf.” The two reportedly met on the set of Nymphomaniac in 2012 and married in Las Vegas in 2016, then filed for divorce in 2018 before reconciling in 2021 and having their daughter in 2022. Throughout this period, their relationship has been the subject of scrutiny, particularly after LaBeouf’s ex-girlfriend FKA twigs filed a lawsuit in December 2020, accusing him of sexual battery, assault, and intentional emotional distress and detailing the allegations in a February 2021 ELLE cover story.
After seeking inpatient treatment, LaBeouf has since spoken openly about his history of alcoholism and aggression, particularly in an August 2022 podcast interview with actor Jon Bernthal. Of his past, he said, “There are few things as ugly as putting your hands on a woman.” It was during his rehab in Utah, LaBeouf says, that Goth reentered his life. As he relayed to Bernthal, the two had been “estranged for years” until one of the center’s “family week” Skype calls. After multiple sessions with no visitors, LaBeouf hadn’t expected a single family member to log in. “And I show up…and Mia is on the screen,” LaBeouf said, breaking down in tears. “She saved my fucking life....She was present for me at a time when I didn’t deserve to have nobody in my life. Especially her.”
Coat, Viktor & Rolf.
Dress, Matières Fécales.
Earlier this summer, twigs asked the court to dismiss all claims against LaBeouf, with their lawyers releasing a joint statement on their mutual behalf: “Committed to forging a constructive path forward, we have agreed to settle our case out of court. While the details of the settlement will remain private, we wish each other personal happiness.”
Goth has nothing she’s comfortable adding to this conversation. Over the years, the actress has drawn a line in the sand when it comes to discussing her private life. In fact, she’d sooner comment on her own ongoing lawsuit, filed against her, West, and A24 in 2024 by the MaXXXine background actor James Hunter, claiming that Goth purposefully kicked him in the head during a scene. “I’m unable to speak to any of that at the moment, but I think if anyone was to do a simple search, they would see what the facts are,” Goth says of the lawsuit. “They can draw their own conclusions. It’s still an ongoing process.”
Goth cites her ability to “compartmentalize” as one of the ways she copes with Hollywood’s pressures. “I’m not the kind of actor who’s unable to shake it off at the end of the day,” she says. “With a daughter, that’s just not realistic.” She has no social media; she doesn’t read comments. It’s “completely irrelevant” whatever people might claim about her online. “I have quite a thick skin in that sense,” she continues. “I have a good life. I’m happy. So things like that don’t affect me.”
“Mia is a unicorn of an actress. It’s not like you could ever say, ‘We need a Mia Goth type,’ because there is no type. There’s just Mia.”
When we spoke in August, Goth had recently returned from Nolan’s Odyssey set—“one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had making a movie”—and was preparing for her role in Star Wars: Starfighter, reportedly set five years after 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “It’s really intense, but I love it,” Goth says. “I’m being pushed in a way that I’ve never been pushed before....This is a completely separate film, not a prequel. It’s its own thing, with new characters. And it’s a great script, a really great script.” Of casting Goth’s role, Starfighter director Levy told me, “We needed a singular actor to play a fiercely complex new character within the Star Wars galaxy. Mia is a unicorn of an actress. It’s not like you could ever say, ‘We need a Mia Goth type,’ because there is no type. There’s just Mia.”
Mask, Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025.
“Please! I’m a staaaaaar!” So go the immortal words of Goth’s antiheroine in the 2022 film Pearl, now meme-ified into oblivion. Goth won’t refer to herself as anything so vainglorious—she’s not even convinced she’s “a great actress”—but she does recognize her penchant for taking big swings on-camera, she says. But to Pearl director West, her career breakthrough “all makes perfect sense. Anything I could have contributed to broaden awareness of her is all well and good, but that was going to happen whether she met me or not.” According to West, Goth was always going to be…well, a star.
Del Toro recognized her power, too, when he saw Pearl as an audience member. “Like everybody else, I was blown away,” he tells me. Having worked in film for four decades, the Frankenstein director says he has no trouble identifying when an actor is “doing a gentle dismount, which is easy, or doing a triple somersault and landing properly. And what she was doing in Pearl was incredibly hard to do. I thought, My God, she just did a quadruple somersault over a fire pit.” He continues, “That’s when I said, ‘However she makes the sauce, I would love to cook with her.’”
The director and Goth met for the first time in an L.A. hotel restaurant in 2023, during which he asked her, point blank, if she wanted to play both Claire Frankenstein (mother to Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein) and Elizabeth (Victor’s eventual love interest) in the adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He’d always envisioned one actress playing both parts, and after watching Goth inhabit both Pearl and Maxine, he knew she could metamorphose as required. “I left that hotel room floating for a good two weeks,” Goth says.
Turtleneck, gown, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.
Coat, blouse, Valentino Haute Couture.
The Frankenstein shoot, which took place in Canada and the U.K. throughout 2024, was difficult and intense, Goth says, though it was equally “special.” She recalls “walking onto that set and being so nervous I could feel my heart beating in my body.” She’d brought Isabel on location with her, “and I didn’t really have the right help in place,” she says. Yet the balancing act gave her insight into Elizabeth, who—despite having no children of her own—serves a maternal role for both Victor and the Creature, a.k.a. Frankenstein’s monster. When del Toro met with Goth, he was influenced by how she spoke of motherhood: how “enraptured,” he says, she’d become with the mission to “care about another human being selflessly.” He decided to tailor the part of Elizabeth to Goth, writing toward the wonder, protectiveness, and compassion he recognized in her. Frankenstein costume designer Kate Hawley recalls Isabel watching her mother climb into a carriage in a sea of ballooning crinoline. “It was like a Cinderella moment,” Hawley says. “You could see how she saw her mother as a princess.”
Goth is careful to clarify that “I wouldn’t want to say that I couldn’t have done this job if I hadn’t been a mother. But I think becoming a mother informed a lot of my choices, and enriched the process.” The actress says she has known she wanted to be a mom from age 3. “It’s a really psychedelic experience to have a child. You’re parenting her, but you’re also parenting the version of you that existed when you were that age. The amount of love that you can feel.…” Goth trails off and offers a warm smile. “She’s the greatest gift of my life.”
She’s deeply mindful of the influence she has on her daughter, who can already recognize that “Mummy is an actress.” (According to Goth, Isabel does not find this impressive.) Goth’s voice becomes stronger, more urgent, as she shares her hopes for their relationship as they grow older. “I really hope to be something steady for her,” she says. “That no matter what happens in her life, she can return to me. No matter what her age—if she’s in a shitty relationship or something’s not going right at work—she can always come home. And she’ll always have a bed to sleep in and a home-cooked meal.”
Hair by Louis Ghewy at MA+ Talent; makeup by Lynsey Alexander at Jolly Collective; manicure by Chloé Nguyên; produced by One Thirty-Eight Productions.
A version of this story appears in the November 2025 issue of ELLE.
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