Mia Goth

Mia Goth modelled as a teenager and made her acting debut in Nymphomaniac in 2013, an unusually severe place to begin, and it set expectations she has spent a decade meeting. The early roles went mostly to directors with a strong house style: A Cure for Wellness, Suspiria, High Life.

What she does that few of her contemporaries will is refuse to protect herself. There is no vanity in the performances and almost none of the small self-editing most screen actors do, which is why she can hold an uncomfortably long shot and why directors who need a face to carry dread keep hiring her. Emma. proved the opposite worked too, with Harriet Smith played light and warm, a register nobody had thought to ask her for.

The breakthrough was the X film series, where she played both Maxine Minx and Pearl between 2022 and 2024 and became the modern scream queen more or less by default. Those films are not among the credits listed here. Since then: Infinity Pool in 2023, Elizabeth in Frankenstein in 2025, Melantho in The Odyssey, and a part in Star Wars: Starfighter. The trajectory has run from art house provocation to studio scale without much visible compromise, which is rarer than it sounds.