Mia Threapleton Isn’t Afraid to Ask Why

Jacket, shirt, trousers, sunglasses, Saint Laurent. Sandals, Giuseppe Zanotti.

Mia Threapleton’s first line in her new film is “Why?” It’s a simple question, but one she manages to infuse with disdain, conviction, and a challenge, her wide-set deep blue eyes burning. Even though she’s early in her career, the prompt has already become a guiding ethos for her and her characters: Why do I need to do things the way they have been done before?

Threapleton is in the “pinch-me moment” of her career, and her interior dialogue is on overdrive. She spent the past year living in a small town outside of Berlin, jumping into lakes in her free time, while her work hours were spent with Bryan Cranston, Tom Hanks, Benicio Del Toro, and Michael Cera for Wes Anderson’s 13th movie, The Phoenician Scheme. She landed the part after completing a long audition process, throughout which she knew nothing about the character she would be portraying. (The character name she got on her audition readings was simply, “Young Girl.”)

Now on the other side of it, she recalls, “I was a bit nervous initially [to meet Anderson], but then he opened the door and was wearing pink socks and slippers, and I wasn’t nervous anymore.” When Threapleton first watched Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, she was 12 years old. “I remember thinking, ‘I want to do that, with that person.’” She locked it away and thought to herself, “Keep it quiet, just watch that film again and again and think about how much you really want to do it.” Now here she is, doing it.

Short zipped jacket, sleeveless T-shirt, trousers, Hermès. Earrings, Tiffany & Co.

In her chemistry read with Del Toro, who she says has the disposition of “a giant purring cat,” she improvised and created a makeshift nun’s habit on the spot, walking over to a coffee station and affixing a napkin to her head. “Does anyone have a hair pin?” she asked. It’s this combination of openness, improvisation, fearlessness, and creativity that makes her a standout in the movie, in which she plays a potential woman of the cloth, struggling to conform to the expectations and demands of those around her.

Her character Honoria Marable in The Buccaneers, the Apple TV+ series based on Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel, shares a similar desire to make her own way, as a young woman who creates a strong outer shell to hide secret yearnings and a new identity. (Season 2 premieres on June 18.)

As for Threapleton’s own youth in the U.S. and England, she recalls it being filled with nature. “Growing up, there was a lot of running through fields,” she says. “If I look back now, it’s quite like a novel. There was a lot of getting dirty knees and making tents out of tarps.” She would also put on plays and try to rope in her siblings and cousins.

One of her early acting roles was also opposite a family member—her mother, Kate Winslet. In 2022, they appeared as a mother-daughter duo in the BAFTA-winning drama I Am Ruth, wherein Threapleton plays a teenager who struggles with the mental health challenges of being online, while Winslet watches helplessly, uncertain how to help her.

Jacket, shirt, trousers, sunglasses, Saint Laurent. Sandals, Giuseppe Zanotti.

Off-screen, having a mother who has been through the trials of being an actor in the public eye has helped steer her into living as private a life as she can. Threapleton has never had social media and says she never will. “People say, ‘Oh, well done,’ to not having it, but I’ve never had it, so I don’t really know what the ‘Well done’ is for. I don’t want it. I don’t want to worry about dropping my phone out of a tree if I’m climbing one because I’m trying to take a photo of something.”

I tell her that I recall Winslet saying in an interview that she wanted to try to raise her children to be less body-conscious, after experiencing extensive body-shaming and harassment at the height of her Titanic fame. Threapleton says she recognizes that from her upbringing, remembering a time when she had felt self-conscious about her shoulders while swimming: “My mom said, ‘No, this is strong. So many people would love to be able to swim the length of the pool the way you do—think of it as a positive thing.’”

Though the degrees of separation between her, her mother, and potential future co-stars may be small, like the children of other famous parents, she’s eager to embrace it all on her own terms.

“I really could count on one hand—both hands possibly—the amount of times that I went to set as a kid. My mother really strived to keep that world separate from our home life. That’s something that she really wanted,” Threapleton explains. “She would say, ‘All of their experiences will be theirs and theirs alone’—which is exactly what has happened.”

Hair by Sami Knight for Rehab; makeup by Alexandra French at Forward Artists; manicure by Jolene Brodeur at The Wall Group; produced by Anthony Federici at Petty Cash Production; photographed at Malibu Creek Ranch.

A version of this story appears in the Summer 2025 issue of ELLE.

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