Mia Goth

Mia Goth (born October 25, 1993, Southwark, London, England) is an English actress best known for her roles in dark and disturbing auteur-directed films such as Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume II (2013), Stephen Fingleton’s The Survivalist (2015), and Ti West’s X horror trilogy (X [2022], Pearl [2022], and MaXXXine [2024]).

Childhood

Goth was born in London to a Brazilian mother who was a waitress and a Canadian father who was a truck driver, and she spent the first few years of her childhood in Rio de Janeiro. As a young girl, she visited her maternal grandmother, actress Maria Gladys, on movie sets and became interested in filmmaking. Goth and her mother moved back to the United Kingdom when Goth was five years old, and five years later they moved to Nova Scotia, Canada, where they lived with Goth’s father. She and her mother returned to London when Goth was 12. She told The Irish Times in 2020 that her peripatetic childhood prepared her for a career as an actress: “At one point in the process of trying to find myself, I would adopt different personalities to fit into whatever environment I was in. I think that was my first introduction to character…and performance.” In her early teens she was discovered by a fashion photographer, and she signed a contract with a modeling agency. By the time Goth was 16, she was auditioning for acting parts.

Early roles: Nymphomaniac: Volume II, The Survivalist, and Emma.

When she was 18, Goth was cast by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier in Nymphomaniac: Volume II (2013), the second half of a sprawling erotic art film about a woman named Joe (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sexual experiences at different stages of her life. Goth portrayed P, a teenager who gets involved with Joe and her husband, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf). Goth received positive reviews for her performance and, as Elle magazine noted in a 2017 profile, “established herself as a unique kind of actress—one who looked so fresh-faced and naïve as to resemble an actual doll, but was a mysterious and, at times, disquieting provocateur underneath.”

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Following that auspicious start, Goth moved to Los Angeles to further her film career. In 2015 she costarred in The Survivalist, a dystopian thriller about three people surviving in the woods. Playing the part of a young woman named Milja, Goth drew praise for her committed approach to acting: She slept outside for the entire shoot, eschewed showers, and ate very little. Also in 2015 she appeared in the mountaineering drama Everest. In 2016 Goth costarred in director Gore Verbinski’s psychological horror film A Cure for Wellness as a resident of a sanatorium. She continued working with well-known directors, including Luca Guadagnino on Suspiria (2018), his remake of the acclaimed 1977 slasher film directed by Dario Argento, and with Claire Denis on the space travel drama High Life (2018).

Having established a reputation for working on grim fare, Goth went against type in Emma. (2020), an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel. She played the innocent Harriet Smith, who is subject to the ill-advised matchmaking of the title character (Anya Taylor-Joy). She then portrayed an avenging leader of a group of women in the genre-bending fantasy Mayday (2021).

Scream queen

In the early 2020s Goth had her highest-profile roles yet, in Ti West’s A24 horror trilogy X (2022), Pearl (2022), and MaXXXine (2024). In X, Goth played both Maxine Minx, a porn actress, and, with the use of heavy prostheses and makeup, an older woman named Pearl, who lives next door to where an adult film is being shot. The film paid tribute to slasher flicks such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Using a visual style that West said was inspired by Douglas Sirk’s mid-20th-century melodramas, Pearl narrates the title character’s backstory as a young woman living on a Texas farm. Goth and West received a screenwriting credit on the movie. The final installment, MaXXXine, follows Maxine as she pursues a movie career in Hollywood in the 1980s. Goth’s performances in the trilogy were widely commended by critics, with The New York Times’ A.O. Scott praising her “utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance” and W magazine declaring Goth “a modern horror icon.”

In 2025 Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025), Goth played Lady Elizabeth Harlander, the fiancée of Victor Frankenstein’s younger brother and a romantic interest for the titular crazed scientist himself. The following year she appeared in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, as Melantho, a treacherous attendant in the household of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus.

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Relationship with Shia LaBeouf

Goth and her Nymphomaniac costar Shia LaBeouf began dating in the early 2010s and in 2016 appeared in a live streamed wedding ceremony in Las Vegas, which was officiated by an Elvis Presley impersonator. In 2018 a representative for LaBeouf said the couple were divorcing. They reconciled and had a daughter in 2022 before again separating three years later.