An Interview with Alice… Mia Wasikowska Steps Back into Her Role in Alice Through The Looking Glass

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“One scene I really like is when I see The Hatter in the marketplace and I’m trying to explain to him that we’ve met, but when he’s older and I’m younger.  I think that’s so sweet, and it’s got such an essence of the original book to it, that whole abstract, quite bizarre nature of it….”

Mia Wasikowska has been an admirer of the Lewis Carroll classic tales of Alice in Wonderland for some time. “I think like the great thing about the books is that you can read them at any stage in your life and they mean like a completely different thing. I hope if anything these interpretations kind of bring people back to the original source material”.

On May 27th Mia reprises her role as Alice Kingsleigh, the heroine in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the highly anticipated sequel to 2010’s Alice in Wonderland. Mia was excited to jump back into Alice’s shoes to take on a new adventure.

“ I really love Alice and I like seeing her journey.  I think in the first film, she was still a little uncomfortable and trying to bridge that gap between knowing who she is and on the inside and then being able to be that on the outside.  And I think that was sort of her journey in the first film.  Then in this film I think she she’s just spend two years as the captain of her own ship, and she has a really strong sense of who she is”.

While Mia Wasikowska had worked with icons Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, and Helena Bonham Carter on the first film, working with Sacha Baron Cohen (who plays “Time”) was a new experience for her.

“I do like the relationship with Alice and Time.  I think Sacha plays like a confident idiot very well,” she says with a laugh. “He’s like this old powerful loser in a way and Alice is the only one that kind of isn’t scared enough to like call him out on how he just doesn’t make any sense at all.   I like that she sort of has no fear in approaching kind of anyone, but especially him, because he’s gotten such a strong ego”.

“I think there’s like a six hour version of the film somewhere, because he improvises a lot, so and he’s quite ambitious about it.  I’m not sure how he thought half of that was going to get in a Disney movie – if you’re at all like familiar with his comedy.  Every day was something like completely different and so I would say he’s very ambitious, very smart and really funny”.

Mia sees a lot of herself in Alice. “She doesn’t have that sense of femininity being like a restriction to her.  And she still manages to be feminine and connected to that side of her without  compromising anything.  I like to think you can have both, not in a way where it’s like limiting to be a woman or to enjoy certain aspects of that”.

As far as role models, she credits her family and actress Julianne Moore. “My grandma and my mom and my older sister, they’re really important to me. Then there’s so many wonderful people like Julianne Moore, she’s such a brilliant actress.  And I think she’s just done so well at doing really interesting films and then also having a great like home life”.

Next up for Mia? A well deserved break. She just finished HHhH starring Rosamund Pike, and after 3 years of back to back filming, she’s looking forward to a couple of months off at her home near Sydney, Australia. That is, until she finds the right project to sink into.  Perhaps comedy.

“I think I think it’s really hard to find a good comedy.  I think there’s a million great dramas every year and but comedies maybe are like a tiny bit harder to find that one that feel really great and funny.  So yeah, I would like to explore that”.  

After the interview I went on Facebook to share my immediate thoughts…

See Mia Wasiowska in Alice Through the Looking Glass, in theaters everywhere May 27th!