Mia Wasikowska has spoken frankly about trading Hollywood’s glare for a quieter life back home in Australia.
The actress, 36, who became a household name as the lead in Tim Burton’s 2010 blockbuster “Alice in Wonderland,” told IndieWire in 2023 that the industry’s relentless pace left her craving something more grounded. “I want to do more things in life other than be in a trailer,” she said.
Wasikowska’s disillusionment ran deeper than logistics. Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2022, she addressed the treatment of young women in the entertainment business with stark candor. “I think you would be hard-pressed to find any young woman who hasn’t experienced a level of abuse or inappropriate experiences or behavior towards them,” she said.
The Australian performer began working professionally as a teenager, a nomadic existence that wore on her over time. “I was doing it since I had been 17, well more like 15, completely like, new city, new country, every three months, and it’s like starting school again every few months,” she explained to IndieWire. “Especially when you’re younger, when you don’t have that base, I found that really hard.”
That rootlessness collided with what she described as the surreal bubble of celebrity itself. “You can really lose perspective because you’re treated quite strangely,” Wasikowska noted. “When that’s your only reality, it’s quite strange.”
The payoff, she acknowledged, was not nothing. She appreciated that “the payoff is good and you feel really great doing it,” but the lifestyle ultimately proved incompatible with who she was. “I felt really disconnected from any greater community,” she said, adding plainly: “I didn’t entirely like the lifestyle.”
By the late 2010s, Wasikowska had relocated to Sydney and pivoted toward independent films with directors she trusted, stepping off what she called the “treadmill” of studio fare. Her credits during the Hollywood years had been substantial: Cary Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre,” Lisa Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right,” and Burton’s 2016 sequel “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” which marked her final major studio outing.
The actress has not ruled out screen work entirely, but her terms have shifted. “If I can have the best of both worlds, which is dip in and out of it occasionally, I’d be really happy, but I wouldn’t ever be in that place where I was just on a treadmill,” she told IndieWire.
She returned to the same theme of perception versus reality that had defined her Hollywood tenure. “It’s great, and there are lots of great things, [but] the perception of it is quite different from the reality and it didn’t suit me as a person,” she said.
Wasikowska first broke through with “Alice in Wonderland,” a $1 billion-grossing fantasy that made her an international star at 21 and led to the 2016 follow-up, after which she gradually withdrew from the studio system.
Wasikowska is expected to maintain her selective approach to projects from her Sydney base while continuing independent collaborations.