MIA WASIKOWSKA
BY LISA MISCHIANTI. PHOTOGRAPHED BY SHARIF HAMZA. STYLED BY ANDREW MUKAMAL

“It all came up really quickly,” recalls Aussie actress Mia Wasikowska of her part in Piercing, director Nicolas Pesce’s psychosexual thriller. “I was supposed to play a different role, then a week before they were about to start filming they asked if I wanted to play Jackie,” she says of her character, a prostitute who ends up in a cat-and-mouse game with a client named Reed, played by Christopher Abbott. “I took a day to think about it, then jumped onboard. Since the film is so risky and disturbing, it was the best way to do it, to not think about it too much.” Based on a Ryū Murakami novel of the same name, the film follows Reed’s sinister scheme to exorcise his inner demons by killing an unsuspecting call girl—but when Jackie arrives, things don’t go as planned.

Wasikowska is familiar with films inspired by literature: she starred in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre adaptation. She’s also used to traversing wildly disparate realms, from Wonderland and Victorian England to the supernatural sphere in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. In her other new movie, the Zellner brothers’ Damsel, she journeys to the Old West with costar Robert Pattinson. For Wasikowska, dabbling in varied environs is among the biggest perks of the job. “Being an actor, you get to inhabit all these different worlds,” she says. “It’s kind of a semi-lazy job where we turn up to amazing sets and we just have to pretend. It’s pretty great.”