08 February 2016
Newsdesk
Actress Mia Goth was terrified of feeling like a fake on her latest movie, so she slept rough for the duration of the shoot.
The star plays Milja in The Survivalist, which is set in a time when starvation is rife so people go to extremes to secure food. Society has fragmented and people must try to stay alive while living in woods, with Mia and her co-stars going on starvation diets 10 weeks before the shoot began. This wasn't enough for the actress though, so she also decided not to wash or shave and to sleep outside for the entirety of filming.
"Everything was a lot tougher than I imagined," she told Britain's The Guardian newspaper. "To do this film justice, you had to go all the way. I’m always super scared of feeling like a fake."
Also vital to Mia was that she approached the project honestly. She is one of a growing number of actresses who are bored of the stereotypical female roles seen on screen, and felt it was incredibly important that Milja should be believable.
"So often in films there are two ways a female can be portrayed: either innocent and virginal or the complete opposite,” she explained. “It’s biblical: the Virgin Mary, and the sl*t of the Earth. You never have the middle ground, and I was really keen to portray a realistic, honest approach of who I think a young woman would be in this situation – strong and independent.”
Mia has never been afraid to bare herself on screen. She starred in director Lars von Trier's infamous Nymphomaniac: Vol. II, which saw her spend a lot of time naked, and when she was a model a campaign she starred in for Miu Miu was banned in the UK. It was deemed too explicit, which Mia still can't understand as she was 22 at the time.
"I thought it was a little silly: that anyone could ever receive that as being a photograph that undermined me as a woman,” she said. “I wasn’t really bothered. It was kind of cool to have worked with (photographer) Steven Meisel on something that was banned. I felt like a little rock star.”
