Kate Winslet’s daughter is the breakout star in Wes Anderson’s upcoming film The Phoenician Scheme
Speaking to Vogue Australia ahead of her Cannes debut, Mia Threapleton has a pinch-me moment stepping into the filmmaker’s latest fantastical dream world.
Just like a scene from a Wes Anderson movie, the starring role in the director’s new film The Phoenician Scheme, came to Mia Threapleton on a train. Well, two of them, actually. “I got the email from my agents on a train, and I did the self-tape almost immediately,” says the English actor. A few weeks later, she was asked to get back on a train to meet the filmmaker in person. Anderson wanted to talk about the role of Liesl, the estranged daughter of a powerful, morally murky businessman called Zsa Zsa, played by Benicio del Toro, who has grand succession plans to appoint her as his sole heir.
“I was very nervous to do that meeting,” Threapleton admits. “Wes opened the door and was wearing slippers and pink socks, and then I wasn’t nervous at all anymore.” A few weeks later, she found herself on yet another train, this time to screen test opposite del Toro. On the way home, once again on a regular English “commuter train”, she recalls with a grin, her agents called to say the role was hers. “I genuinely think I made her hang up and call casting because I really didn’t believe it,” Threapleton says. “She wrote me back and said, ‘I promise you I’m not lying.’ And then I subsequently went to a bike locker on the train and sat down on the floor and had a good little cry.”
Threapleton, 24, is speaking from her bedroom in the UK, gauzily lit by strings of fairy lights. (“My leg’s gone to sleep,” she yelps at one point, revealing she has been sitting on the floor.) Best known for playing Honoria in the ravishingly frothy adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers – a second season comes to Apple TV+ next month – Threapleton is also the daughter of Kate Winslet. “I feel like it’s a misconception about me, considering who my mother is, that I grew up going to set or that I would know anything about this world because of her and what she does,” Threapleton begins. “That is really not the case at all. I genuinely can count on not even two hands the amount of times I went to set as a kid. Because it sort of feels the equivalent of a lawyer taking their child into a court hearing. You wouldn’t really do that, it’s still a place of work. There were never scripts lying around the house at home. Mum’s office was Mum’s office, and that was where all the work stuff happened.” The rest of the house was just a normal family home, Threapleton says – “full of pillow forts,” she adds, smiling – a place where, as a teenager, she could stumble upon Jodie Foster’s performance as a nascent gangster’s moll in Bugsy Malone and feel the tug of a thread of intrigue. “My exposure to film, and learning that I really love it, came through me finding it on my own, really.”
The Phoenician Scheme, is Threapleton’s Bugsy Malone, a breakout role in her biggest production yet. The film is the revered auteur’s twelfth project, and the first in Anderson’s oeuvre that could conceivably be called an ‘action movie’. That is, an action movie with an Andersonian veneer, where the artillery is stored in a fruit crate and Liesl’s weapon of choice as she darts around the world with her father is a gilt dagger with a ruby the size of a plum stuck to its hilt.
Threapleton arrived in Berlin to begin production without having ever spent much time on a soundstage in a big studio. When she walked onto the epic sets, conceived in intricate, dollhouse detail by Anderson’s longtime production designer Adam Stockhausen, she was “flabbergasted”. “These are entire worlds that have been dreamed up and made,” Threapleton exclaims, recalling one particular splendorous marble hall in which Liesl and Zsa Zsa are reunited at the beginning of the film. “I’m walking on a completely different planet right now. I’m walking into Wes World,” she remembers thinking. Travelling to Rome for the first time – “lucky me!” – for fittings with Anderson’s costume designer, Milena Canonero, was another pinch-me moment. The legendary Canonero, who has nine Oscar nominations and four wins, including one for Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, measured Threapleton for Liesl’s period-appropriate undergarments and crisp novitiate uniform. “It creased really easily and I recognised that very early on,” she says. “Everyone kept bringing me chairs and I was like, ‘I can’t! We’ll have to steam it and that’s gonna be a faff.’ I would stand up in the back of the car travelling to work. I think Wes and Benicio both turned to me on separate days and went, ‘Are you gonna sit down today?’ I’m like, ‘Nope!’”
At the start of The Phoenician Scheme, Liesl, abandoned as a child at a convent, declares her intention to become a bride of Christ. Time spent with her father helps break down her hard shell of neglect to understand both the reason for his distance and his desire for rapprochement. “Nobody’s ever told me I have anybody’s anything,” Liesl says plainly, when interrogated about the similarity between the pair’s wide, soulful eyes. “She is quite serious, but I don’t think she necessarily takes herself too seriously,” Threapleton reflects. “To do an Australian quote, ‘She’s not here to fuck spiders.’” The actor breaks into waves of laughter. “It’s a brilliant expression. I’m sad we don’t use it more as English people,” she adds, her tone mischievous. In conversation, Threapleton telegraphs an earthy, no-nonsense demeanour. Take the vampy, Tippi Hedren-red nails Liesl adopts when she eventually sheds her nun’s habit. “Oh god, the nails,” she groans, wryly. “I don’t ever do my nails cos I’m always doing something with my hands and they’re always breaking and I can’t really be arsed most of the time.”
One of Threapleton’s earliest roles was opposite her mum in an episode of the 2022 television series I Am. The pair played a mother and daughter whose relationship is tested by social media. Rather than following a traditional script, Threapleton and Winslet improvised every single line of dialogue.
Not so on a Wes Anderson set. The director’s instantly recognisable cinematography – those famous whip pans and gliding tracking shots – is made possible through many takes (“because he knows exactly what he’s looking for”) and long rehearsals. “It’s very structured. It’s not rigid,” Threapleton explains. She remembers resting with her hands on her hips in between set-ups on her first day of filming. “Wes poked his head around the monitor and was like, ‘You can do that again for the next one,’” Threapleton smiles. “So the small, very human things that we would just be doing, he wanted them in.”
The exact positioning of her habit was another happy, human accident. “We were trying a wig on, and the nun’s veil, but we didn’t have the right one. I looked on the coffee table and there was a napkin and I said, ‘Has anyone got hairpins?’ And I pinned a tea towel to my head,” she says, brightly. “Apparently Wes really loved it, because that’s what ended up becoming the veil. Oh, so many memories come floating back when I talk about it.” Threapleton looks around, wonderingly. Such as the first time she tried on her costume, in Canonero’s Rome atelier. “Oh wow, I’m not dreaming,” she remembers. “This is really happening.”
The Phoenician Scheme is in cinemas on May 29.
This story is from the May issue of Vogue Australia. On sale now.
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