Mia Threapleton Is Wes Anderson’s Next Breakout Star—and Happens to Be Kate Winslet’s Daughter

A few months ago, Mia Threapleton got an email from Wes Anderson. The director told her that the movie they’d shot last year, The Phoenician Scheme, was finished, and asked when she’d be available to watch it. “My movie theater etiquette brain kicked in. I thought, Okay, well, if there are other people in there, I can’t bring a loud snack, so what am I going to do?” Threapleton tells Vanity Fair. “I know: I’ll buy two huge tomatoes from the grocers around the corner.” She brought the fresh produce to the theater before realizing she’d be watching the movie alone. “The minute the opening credits started rolling, I burst into tears while about to take a bite out of a tomato,” she says.

Threapleton cried intermittently through the rest. She felt startled by her prominence on the big screen: “Oh my God, there’s my face. That’s a lot of my face.” Afterwards, she sent Anderson a voice note telling him how much she loved the film, and relayed the whole tomato story. He told her he was happy she enjoyed the movie—and added, “I wish someone had told you that we were going to be on your own. You could have had a louder snack.”

All of this, in fairness, is new to Threapleton. The 24-year-old English actor has appeared in a handful of films and TV series, including a small part in the Jude Law period drama Firebrand and a main role on Apple TV+’s The Buccaneers. But a lead role in an Anderson film—stuffed, as always, with A-listers and his most beloved recurring collaborators—is beyond uncharted territory. Premiering later this month at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, the movie marks the moment Threapleton will be discovered by a larger public, to say nothing of the industry itself; despite being a newcomer to this singular filmmaker’s world, she’s a thrillingly natural fit. It’s also the moment more people are bound to learn about Threapleton’s background—specifically, that she is Kate Winslet’s daughter.

Threapleton has no interest in hiding this fact. She recently acted opposite her Oscar-winning mother in a devastating installment of Channel 4’s I Am… series, for which Winslet won a BAFTA, and speaks to me about her upbringing—and decision to follow in Winslet’s footsteps—with a breezy ease. “She was incredibly supportive of my desire to want to do this on my own because that’s how she did it. She did it on her own,” Threapleton says. “Now I get to talk to her about cool work stories that I have experienced myself, which is lovely. I’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah, then the camera does that weird thing. Have you had that as well?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, yeah! I know about that! God, that’s so funny when that happens.’”

As to the blinding spotlight, and ensuing scrutiny, that will come with walking the red carpet at Cannes for the first time? Threapleton demurs: “I mean, people are going to find out.”

Anderson watched hundreds of quick audition tapes while casting the role of Sister Liesl in The Phoenician Scheme. Threapleton’s reading stood out. “She was clearly really thinking about every moment. She just seemed completely authentic,” the filmmaker tells me. “When you see the same scene played again and again and again by people who maybe aren’t right for the part anyway, to have somebody who seems like she’s in a documentary and she’s interesting—this stops everything.”

Anderson asked to meet her in person in London. “I went and met Wes, and instantly wasn’t nervous about him at all because he was wearing pink socks and hotel slippers with glasses,” Threapleton says. “We just talked for a really long time. We both had this moment of going, ‘We should probably do some acting right?’” She didn’t start to get familiar with the script until later, and it was treated as top secret; she could only access an encrypted file in tight time windows before the screen test that followed. When she got word of her official casting, she was surrounded by strangers on a train. “I burst into tears and hid in a bike locker on the train, and just sat down and cried and called everybody I could think of to call,” she says.

When we meet Sister Liesl, she’s headstrong, quick-witted, and emotionally removed from her father, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro)—a wealthy businessman with a long list of enemies. They haven’t seen each other in six years when he seeks her out, after surviving yet another attempt on his life. (His sixth plane crash, to be exact.) He presents her with an elaborate plan to secure her future by appointing her the successor of a dicey land-expansion project that’s been decades in the making. The two of them and his mild-mannered, heavily accented Norwegian tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera) embark on a dangerous yet whimsical mission to see it through, peppered along the way with such stars as Bryan Cranston, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Here, Anderson movingly revisits the kind of troubled father-daughter dynamic he explored in The Royal Tenenbaums, within the structure of a fast-paced caper that’s at times giddily reminiscent of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The plot’s high-risk hijinx paves a path for a resonant family tale. “There is a gulf between them, but the movie is the story of them negotiating their way across this gulf and making a deal to be a family,” Anderson says. In the role, Threapleton pulls off a distinctive, almost deadpan heartbreak. “Liesl seemed like an onion. There were small half layers, and then there were big whole layers,” the actor says. “Then you get to the middle, and there’s just always more and more stuff…more layers to run around.”

With production set up in Germany, Threapleton experienced Anderson’s full “summer camp” approach to filmmaking. Everyone stayed in the same hotel. The ground floor featured AV offices and the costumes department, with hair and makeup down the hall; breakfast and dinner was “in the middle bit,” with individual rooms on the other side. When it got warm, Threapleton went swimming with the crew in the lake nearby. She got asked out to lunch by Cranston one day, and had to remind herself, “Okay, it’s not Walter White. That’s Bryan Cranston. That’s your coworker, Mia.” Those pinch-me moments happened pretty regularly.

“I remember this moment where I had Tom Hanks on my left, Bryan Cranston on my right, Riz Ahmed diagonally, Benicio in front of me, Wes at one end, and Michael to the other side,” Threapleton says. “Tom was telling a story about an experience that he’d had filming Saving Private Ryan. I just sat there and I put my hands under my legs. I’m thinking, It’s bloody Woody. Get out! What am I doing here? This is ridiculous.”

Threapleton has been an Anderson fan since she saw Fantastic Mr. Fox when she was nine years old, and points to Moonrise Kingdom as a personal favorite. Given the director’s exacting nature, she wondered what it would be like to work with him. She, Cera, and Del Toro rehearsed for about a week before cameras started rolling, and they found an instant rhythm. (Of the trio, only Del Toro had worked with Anderson before, in The French Dispatch.) “This is probably going to sound a little bit strange…but [Wes] loves naturalism,” Threapleton says. “He’s so clear about what it is that he wants…. But the amount of creative freedom that everybody has while working with him is brilliant.” By the first official day of filming, she felt fully—almost disarmingly—in sync with his worldview.

“One day pretty early on in the shoot, we were in the kitchen, and Wes came in and just quickly moved something and then went back,” Threapleton recalls. “We all sort of looked at it and went, ‘Oh yeah, that should always have been like that. That makes complete sense.’” She’d ask about making physical adjustments: an eye movement, an eyebrow lift, “are my shoulders up or down more?” She likens filming a given scene in The Phoenician Scheme to being a part of a “tableau”: “It’s happening right in front of you, and there aren’t that many cuts…. You are living in it every single day.”

Threapleton first went to Germany for a film shoot when she was seven years old—though not for her own film, of course. The family spent some time there while Winslet shot The Reader, the Holocaust drama that won her a best-actress Oscar. “We didn’t know anything about it at all,” Threapleton says. This was generally how things worked growing up. She did not have a sense of her mother’s decorated career. Hollywood was kept as far away from her as it seemed on the map. “[An actor] taking their kid to a film set seems like the equivalent of a lawyer taking their child into a courtroom,” Threapleton says.

Around 10 years old, she got her first sense of Winslet’s notoriety. The star was asked to do a reading at a literary festival; Threapleton was in the crowd, surrounded by adoring fans. “I propped myself up on my knees and looked around, and there were so many people,” Threapleton says. “I ran over to her at the end, and I said, ‘Oh my God, mum. Loads of people came. Loads of people know who you are!’ She said, ‘Yeah, they kind of do.’” But Threapleton says she wasn’t used to seeing scripts around the house or feel fame encroaching on the family’s private life. Every part of Winslet’s career was contained in the star’s small home office, which Threapleton never dared enter because “there were usually birthday presents that were hidden under the desk.”

“I’ve never had social media. I don’t want it. It’s not something that I think would really serve my life very much,” Threapleton continues. “I never really read magazines either. So I was just never that aware of the knownness of her until I got a little bit later in my teenage years.”

Her childhood dream of being a marine biologist was dashed when she realized “I can’t do math, and I’m rubbish at science.” She was about 13 when she first said out loud that she wanted to be an actor; her mom was the first person she told. “She said, ‘Amazing, okay, I’m so excited for you,’ and I won’t ever forget what she said next,” Threapleton says, before an uncanny Winslet starts coming through in her voice. “She said, ‘It’s really hard work, darling. It’s really hard work—but that’s why I love it.’”

She treated this like a mantra. Threapleton went out on her own, looking for agents and seeking out open auditions on casting websites. She’s now beaten her mother to the distinction of starring in a Wes Anderson movie.

On her days off from shooting, Threapleton hung around the Phoenician set. She’d sneak into a corner to watch the action without disrupting it. “I ended up hiding under a table with a tablecloth and watching from behind the camera while laying on my stomach,” she says. “Honestly, I felt like a kid.”

That feeling still comes up occasionally. When she first got the job, she assumed she was in a dream and waited for someone to wake her up. Now, a few weeks out from the premiere, she’s back in that state. “I know that it’s happening now, and people are going to see it, but I really can’t believe that I was a part of it. I really can’t,” she says. “I am never going to forget any of it. None of it at all. I’m going to keep it close to my heart. I feel like I’m still dreaming.”

This story is part of Awards Insider’s in-depth Cannes coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the event’s biggest names. Stay tuned for more Cannes stories as well as a special full week of Little Gold Men podcast episodes, recorded live from the festival and publishing every day.