Mia Goth: Euro Twit or Next Gen Talent?

Where are her eyebrows?



Is she playing crazy or actually crazy?

Next Gen Talent.

Definitely talented and one of the better young actors today.

I remember when Siskel and Ebert were ecstatic over the moment in Lethal Weapon when Mel Gibson put a Beretta in his mouth contemplating suicide as L. Riggs. They remarked that it showed true depth, that this was a Hamlet moment. Turns out Mel wasn't playing crazy. He was crazy.

Even crazy people have to play crazy. Communicating those emotions and states of mind through a camera and to an audience is what much of an actor's talent is. Lots of crazy people wouldn't know the first thing about how to appear crazy in a film. Gibson was (is?) a great actor.


That said, I've seen very little by Goth, but can't say I've been even remotely impressed by what I have seen so far.

I do often wonder how often great performances I've seen were actually a feat of sublime casting as opposed to a feat of sublime acting.

Definitely. There's a Klaus Kinsky school of acting guideline out there that is just 'be yourself'.

In some cases, yes. In some cases, I don't think so. Depends on the "talent" and the content, I think.


I'll grant that Gibson was (is?) a great screen presence and that he was fun to watch. I never thought of him as a great actor, but yes he is an actor. But I strongly suspect aspects of his acting are "method" and that his "method" is "crazy." In some moments, I get the sense that Mel is not so much putting the mask on, but rather taking it off.



Of course, this raises the question, "What is talent?" and we can always think back to the ancient Greeks who found artistic talent to be touched by madness. If our muse or daemon leaves us slightly touched, then madness is talent (or a sign of it). Even if I yield the dubious term "talent" to you, however, I still think that there is distinction worth probing in the question that this thread asks.

I suppose I can accept this, up to a point, but there are some people who when you put them in front of camera you get interesting stuff because you're documenting them (being themselves). Other people, on the other hand, are making conscious choices and working in that moment to puppet themselves to create a simulacrum (e.g., of madness).

There are many sighted people who would not know how to appear blind in a movie, but if we were to hire a blind actor for our film, we would not expect to hear praise of the blind actor effectively creating the appearance of being blind on camera. I say ditto for crazy.



And there are a good many crazy people who you can turn loose and document and get interesting stuff (because they aren't pretending). If the only requirement is remembering lines and blocking, you'd be surprised how many people can do that.

I don't know what to make of her. She does have a certain presence and a look (then again I suppose most women on film without eye brows would have an arresting look for that reason alone) I saw here in that nutty Infinity Pool flick and I've seen bits and pieces of X and Pearl.



I am having a hard time calibrating, because the stuff she is in (i.e., A24 films) is nutty and she is playing a nutty in a world of nutty with nutty directors, so I am not not sure what I am seeing.



Our colleagues have assured us that she is top-shelf, so I don't know. They might very well be right. I guess the real test would a more conventional role in a more conventional film?

Have you seen 'The Survivalist'? Have you seen' High Life'? Have you seen 'Nymphomaniac II' ?

She's great in those. And she definitely has eyebrows, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. She's just fair skinned:

Sorta-kinda related but I'm reminded of something Michael McKean said, about his character in Better Call Saul who suffered from a seemingly psychosomatic condition: "If they ask you to play a character who hallucinates seeing unicorns, you play a character who's seeing unicorns."

I've only seen the last of those and it was Lars Von Bathos, so again, hard to calibrate.



I suppose that you're recommending the first two?



Does she really, tho?

I'm not going anywhere near a comment that puts talent in quotes.



Like anything, there are different ways to be a good actor. There are those who just have a naturalistic and unaffected presence in front of a camera. There are those who break down the internal world of a character and give them backstories and think of who these people they are portraying are outside of the margins and allow this to bleed into the performance (DeNiro, Brando, Hoffman). There are those who are just wildly unpredictable (Kinski, Timothy Carey, Crispin Glover) who may simply just be mad but have learned how to physically embody their real life madness. And then there are simply the dynamos, the charmers, those whose eyes we are magnetically drawn to (Cruise, Clint Eastwood). I think Gibson is mostly this last one, but he does have elements of these other methods. But they all involve talent. Not everyone can do this. As a person who was in drama classes for years, trust me on this.





I don't think it is a simple as you are making it out. Even if we take your blind person example, let's slightly alter this and say the actor is just as blind as the character is supposed to be. But the actor has been blind since birth and the character has only recently lost their sight.



Now is a blind actor going to be able to move around a room they've never been in before, feeling their way forward with their hands, stepping cautiously as I imagine you must when you can't see, more authentically than an actor pretending to be blind? Probably. Can we call that better acting? No.


But would an actor who has been blind since birth be able to emulate the sensation and physically and mental headspace of someone who has just recently lost their sight. This takes more preparation. They would need to think about what it was like to have sight, and then have it taken away, and how that would affect the way they move around a room. How they would use their hands. How they would walk. How they would express this new kind of confusion with their facial expressions. In this situation a trained actor is more likely to have the edge to communicate this experience better to an audience.


Much like those who talk about music being about the notes that aren't being played, acting is not so different. An actor, in many ways, is an editor. They need to refine their physical self and the manner of their voice to the necessary gestures that don't take away from what they are hoping to express. They have to suggest more than they are showing us. When we think of those who over act, we are thinking of those who throw in too much information for the audience, thinking they must over compensate to let the audience in on who they are. But a good actor understands how to get that effect in the audience directly. By removing what only distracts. But zoning right in on the pulse of the character.


Not everyone can do this.


I don't think there is any question an actor is very indebted to directors and scriptwriters and editors and lighting technicians. A performance can definitely be sunk by lots of forces outside of their control. But I don't think this negates the talent of acting. It actually just shows how tenuous it is to pull off a truly great performance.



I may have only seen her in that X movie. I thought she was bad while everyone else thought she was great. Maybe it's a bad example of her work, but it sure seemed to be getting accolades within the horror community.

She was phenomenal in Pearl.

Oh yeah, I guess I should kinda answer the question in the thread title:

Mia Goth unsettles me. I don't know if that's inherent to her or if she's trying to do it and succeeding. If it's the latter than I guess she's pretty talented, but per the above maybe she's just a person I find creepy and she's simply (well) cast for that reason. The kinds of films she often ends up in seems consistent with that idea, at least.

"Talent" is a contested term there, so I can't not put it in quotes without resolving the very questions at issue (i.e., conceding that the talent is talent by the use of the word "talent").



However, as this comment also puts talent in quotes, you won't touch this one, either. CHEAT CODE UNLOCKED

Fine, suppose then we cast a person who IRL has only recently lost their sight. Do we praise the "acting"? LOL.

I'm stumped. Is it talent or is it Maybelline?

We all know you'd sell your soul to the devil to be that scarecrow.



Yeah, she's like Alice in Wonderland gone liberated psycho killer chick.


"I know you love me and will be with me always. You will, won't you? WON'T YOU?"

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

She comes across pleasant in interviews I've seen and certainly not crazy.

I like her, good actress from what I've seen so far. Definitely next gen.

My example was to illustrate that we don't judge acting on one element of their character in a total vaccuum. And even if we are doing that, we shouldn't be taking that element and flattening it into this one binary thing.



Yes, a blind actor is going to be better at being blind than a non blind actor. And yes, a recently blind actor is going to be better at being recently blind than a non blind actor. This goes without saying.



But this is a simplification of what acting is. Acting isn't simply a matter of mimicking. To use a completely different example, it's why I think Joaquim Phoenix's acting in Walk the Line is a pretty bad performance. Yes, I see Johnny Cash there. But I don't necessarily understand Johnny Cash from watching him. Phoenix, normally a very good actor, becomes blinded by the physical presence of such a legend, and I find as a result, never gets beneath his skin. He doesn't illuminate what is laying 'silent' within the man. He doesn't find the unspoken truths about who Johnny Cash was. But....yeah...it's a very good impersonation.


So if you want to keep pushing this back to aping the mannerisms of (in your example) how a blind person reacts to the world around them, yes, the blind person is going to do the better job. And, no, I don't think that is acting if that is the only element we are looking at.


But we shouldn't only be looking at such a superficial part of the performance. Not that these don't matter at all, they do, they help bolster the feeling that we are seeing something authentic. But inhabiting a character and giving those words on the page life is what acting is. And your example is conveniently ignoring this part.



Frankly, this is kind of a perfect example of our general divide on these issues. You have a great level of suspicion when it comes to the more ephemeral or unseen or abstracted elements that are all a part of the artistic experience, both as the creator and the audience. You seem to want ways to prove quality. To quantify it with very obvious specifics that bolster your argument. Someone being a bad mimic in acting (or, in this case, less good than the actual blind person), would be a very easy way to say 'this is not a good performance'. Or 'see, acting really isn't a thing that any regular blind person can't do'.



But you aren't looking under the hood. In fact, you seem to get frustrated at anyone who does because, I guess, you think this makes the response too personal to be mapped. Too far removed from your experience. Too unconvincing as a scientific experiment with observable results we can measure and quantify.



But there is more to these things. What is a tangible reality in regards to any artistic experience as an audience member is our emotional responses. And we sometimes don't know why we are reacting the way we do to what we see. There is frequently some x factor that is at play, that maybe is designed by the artists/actors, or maybe is simply a happy accident. But the emotions and the feelings and the ideas that these things generate do in fact exist, even if we can't specifically map them.



And for me the value of art is to dig directly into these specific kinds of mysterious emotional responses. The ones that are harder to understand and that relate to part of our own invisible internal lives and that we would struggle to articulate without the aid of movies or music or paintings or books. Deducing the actual worth or quality of a film is its own kind of conversation (and one that is also ultimately impossible), but it frequently runs contrary to these ones, which you have a tendency to just immediately discount.


Which I think is weird considering how highly you value the experience of the audience. That it's all about the audience. But isn't someone (like myself) talking about how I relate to a film, and how it moved me, and trying to reconcile the mystery of how it did this, 100 percent about the audience experience? Or do I have to be a tens of millions of people first before you are willing to accept this as something of value?



So in regards to acting, the reality is some performances also have this elusive quality. And some actors get to this more often than others do. Maybe sometimes by accident, maybe sometimes by design, and maybe I never really care which one as long as they keep bringing it.



Now can I explain how (for a random example) the way Meryl Streep is holding a glass during one particular scene is what highlights everything that is going on inside of her, while all of her words say the opposite. I have no idea. It's a difficult task to explain how what I see on screen and what I feel in my personal life intersect, but for me the struggle of explaining that is the point. That is what art offers. And acting, as an artform, offers me just as much opportunity to do this as what a director does, or an author, or a painter, or a musician. Ways to articulate not only who we are when we watch a film, but who we just are generally.

Never underestimate the power of suggestion, perception and expectation. It governs about half of human behavior. That generally occurs to me with Streep. Not that she's not a decent actor, but we've spent years labelling her as "great". We assume that every little thing a great actor does is calculated to have an effect and a meaning, when maybe it's just that our expectation is that it's significant, so WE fill in the details. In a past life, I was in the psychology world and everything there is riddled with expectations and self fulfilling prophecies. This gets heavier because people who edit movies look for that subtle move that "means something".

Mia Gypsy Mello da Silva Goth seems to be quite a self-created character, acting as an actor. She's one of those people who, when casting people need someone to fill a "Mia Goth" role, they hire Mia Goth. After all, it it was 1952 and you needed an actor to be a John Wayne-like character, would you hire James Stewart?