'She might be short, but she's terrific': The sensational break-out star of The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson and the cast of The Phoenician Scheme tell the BBC about how they made the film, and about its formidable young star, and daughter of Kate Winslet, who plays a pipe-smoking trainee nun.

One of the trademarks of a Wes Anderson film is the guaranteed tranche of famous faces that always appear. But the charismatic actor set to be the biggest talking point in Anderson's latest feature, The Phoenician Scheme, is practically unknown. Twenty-four-year-old Mia Threapleton, whose mother is the actor Kate Winslet, has been described by critics as "sensational" in her first leading role, following the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week.

Threapleton plays Liesl, a red-lipped, pipe-smoking, alcohol-drinking noviciate nun, whose withering put-downs turn her father Zsa Zsa Korda, a wealthy tycoon embarking on a questionable multi-national infrastructure project (aka "The Phoenician Scheme"), into putty. She is ordered out of her convent to go on a trip with him, as he tries to groom her, comedy Don Corleone-style, for the family business.

"When we auditioned her, I remember there was this moment that we locked eyes and she didn't blink," Benicio del Toro, who plays Korda, tells the BBC about his first encounter with Threapleton. "When she walked out, I remember telling Wes, 'I think she can go toe to toe; she might be short, but she's terrific,'" he says.

Threapleton also impressed Wes Anderson, who calls her performance in the film "electric". "Mia's not a towering person physically," Anderson tells the BBC. "She's much littler than Benicio. He looms over her. And the thing with her character is she had to be able to intimidate Benicio del Toro, who's playing somebody who's going to walk out of a cornfield with blood all over his face and keep going, and that's not necessarily an easy thing to do.

"And there's never a second to me in the movie where you feel that he dominates her. If anybody is in command of this relationship, it's her. Benicio is more experienced, more famous, more everything and a great big guy. But the way [Mia] occupies the space in these scenes, she has just this presence and solidity. And that was nothing to do with anything I asked for or discussed with her."

Threapleton made her acting debut as a young teenager in 2014, playing a role in the period drama A Little Chaos, which her mother starred in. She has been in TV series such as Dangerous Liaisons and The Buccaneers, but playing Liesel is her first major film role in Hollywood.

"I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to work with Wes at such an early point in my career," she tells the BBC. "And not just him, but Benicio and the rest of the cast. I remember being about 12 years old and watching Moonrise Kingdom and thinking, 'I really, really, really want to work with Wes Anderson one day' – and then I was 23, and I got to do that."

But she isn't the only newcomer to the Anderson film universe; another of her co-leads, Michael Cera, also finally realised his – and his fans' – ambition by starring in one of the director's films, as Bjorn, a bug-obsessed Norwegian tutor who is in love with Liesl. At the film's Cannes press conference, Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays an evil, kohl-lined uncle, who may have killed his sister-in-law) described Anderson's pairing with Cera as "like God discovering water… it's the perfect partnership".

"I tell you, I never turned him down, so it wasn't my fault," Cera tells the BBC, about why it took so long for the "perfect partnership" to come into being. "I did actually have to miss an opportunity to be in Asteroid City, but just because of the bad timing of my son being born. But I've been obsessed with Wes since I was a teenager and would have leapt at any opportunity."

Cera also says that the father-daughter relationship Anderson and writing partner Roman Coppola created for Del Toro and Threapleton, "chokes [me] up. It's very emotionally satisfying for me. You don't realise until the very end perhaps, that's the story you're being told. The way it wraps up makes you realise what everything was about".

An exploration of a family dynamic is hardly a departure for this director, but Anderson says that he and Coppola had been planning something quite different for the story. They were, he says, intending on writing something "very dark" about an industrialist who "is not really concerned with how the big decisions he has empowered himself to make for the world, are affecting populations of workforces and landscapes."

"Originally what I thought we would make was about a guy who refuses to be killed, who refuses to die even when he does die, and that he's gathering people, resources, minerals, great possessions and money and none of it is having any effect on him," Anderson tells the BBC. "It was going to be about someone who learns a lot and changes zero. But that wasn't what we ended up writing at all." By the end of the first scene, he adds, they'd gone into "a vision, a biblical motif" which gives the film a black-and-white subplot of Korda's judgement in heaven, presided over by Bill Murray as God. But the heart of the film became the father-daughter love story Threapleton and del Toro enact.

"I think if I didn't have a nine-year-old daughter, this character Korda probably wouldn't have a daughter," Anderson confesses. "There's also an inspiration for the character from my father-in-law (the late Lebanese construction entrepreneur Fouad Mikhael Malouf) and I observed the relationship between him and my wife. So parts of my life went into this one. Roman Coppola has a daughter, Benicio has a daughter. It's something that connected all of us and I think that's how it got into the centre of the film."

Apart from Threapleton's dazzling performance, The Phoenician Scheme has received mixed reviews, with one critic describing the plot as "a series of skits and static Anderson-esque tableaux, encountering A-list cameos decked out in deadpan". But another calls it "in all its Andersonian obfuscation, about the tyranny of oligarchy and the hoarding of wealth, a call to sanity and compassion, targeting the rich crazies currently making a mint and a mess out of our planet".

Despite Anderson having some detractors, actors return time after time to appear in his  films. For many of his cast, this comes down to the joy of making them. "I think he celebrates beautiful things and very human things," Jeffrey Wright, now on his third Anderson film, tells the BBC. "It's creatively satisfying and maybe that is something miraculous, particularly now in an incredibly cynical time."

"Wes is not cynical in the least. It's extraordinarily refreshing when an artist such as him is so optimistic, so passionate, so curious about really every facet of life," adds British actor Rupert Friend. "It reminds me – it sounds awfully cheesy – that life is amazing."

More like this:

• The Phoenician Scheme Cannes review

• The meaning behind Cannes' 'naked dress' ban

• Die, My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence is 'better than ever'

The Phoenician Scheme was made in Babelsberg Studios in Germany; the cast and crew stayed together and shared mealtimes, which is standard practice on an Anderson set.  Threapleton describes the experience as "the best summer camp ever".

"I don't even know if the word 'unique' does it enough justice because he has an ability to bring together all of these people, and the reason they're there is because they love their job," she explains. "They really care, and they really love him, so it makes for a brilliant work environment that's so collaborative." 

"The idea of the circus, or the travelling acting troupe, that's what I am drawn to and I like stories with that kind of atmosphere," Anderson says. "There is an itinerant feel about the way I make films; we tend to make these stories in different countries, in different settings, and we bring our group to those places, and it's always a big reunion when we start a new movie. Ultimately, I think the only true reason why we work this way is because I think it's more fun and I like it more."

The Phoenician Scheme is released in the UK on 23 May, and in the US on 30 May.

--

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. 

For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.