The Many Faces of Mia

Horror films made her a phenomenon. What's next could make her an icon.

- Photographed by WILLY VANDERPERRE Styled by PAUL SINCLAIRE Story by LAUREN PUCKETT-POPE

Coat, feather bodysuit, BALENCIAGA COUTURE.

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 three-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.”

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 Christian Dior bag sitting beside her iced Americano. (She is, after all, a newly minted Dior ambassador.) 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.”

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