Mia Tharia blasts into the small Soho offices where we’re having our interview in a breathless rush: she lost her keys, but she’s found them now and she’s so sorry and she ran over as quickly as she could. But the actor is mere minutes late. Tonight’s the premiere of her debut film September Says at the London Film Festival and she’s going straight into hair and make-up after we chat, and then to the premiere down the road from where she grew up in South London. She’ll be wearing a new suit, she tells me shyly. And she’s very excited.
Unfailingly polite, charmingly effusive, this entrance encapsulates Tharia in a nutshell. After years of local community youth theatre and at barely 19 years old, her star is suddenly on the rise: she plays the lead, July, in Ariane Labed’s directorial debut, a Gothic tale of one sister under the thrall of the other which premiered at Cannes. She’ll soon follow this up with a major part in Taika Waititi’s upcoming adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.
“I was very bug-eyed throughout,” she confesses of the whirlwind experience of being first discovered at Brixton Youth Theatre by September Says’ casting director. “We were all trying to impress her and I went very overboard.” What does overboard look like to Tharia? “Improvisations and stuff,” she laughs, rolling her eyes at her past self. “It was all these excitable kids and I wanted to come across as funny, but if you’re trying to be funny, you’re not funny.”
”That speaks to me: finding your own version of what something looks like, instead of there being a right way”
Tharia seems very aware of her youth, and seeing her perched on the edge of the sofa in an oversized jumper and hair tucked neatly behind her ears, it’s hard not to be aware of it too. But there is a tangible maturity behind her performance as the gawky, unnerving July. “On the surface she can seem very timid,” Tharia says of the character. “But there is this curiosity to her. She hasn’t known herself outside of her sister [September] and that tension is really interesting. What does it mean to try and step into the unknown? Is it worth it? Or will it actually destroy you?”
Acting has always provided Tharia a way to think some of these knottier ideas through. “I’m going to say the cliched thing of, I was a very shy child,” she laughs when asked about her lifelong pull towards acting. “But it’s true!” Her parents had no professional ties to the industry (her mother works for the NHS, her father does “…science?” she says sheepishly), but they encouraged her creativity from a young age, listening to radio plays performed over the phone and enrolling her in theatre programmes. “Those spaces encouraged me to look internally at what works for me,” Tharia explains. “That speaks to me as a person – find[ing] your own version of what something looks like, instead of there being a right way.”
Her love of acting is rooted in this hunt for another person’s interiority. It served her well in landing the part in Klara and the Sun (another chaotic audition, she admits wryly, in which she forgot her lines and improvised with Waititi) and underpins her interest in other parts of the performance process, such as writing and directing. She’s part of a playwriting collective, an experience that allows her to “observe a little more” and explore other perspectives, and even staged one of her own plays at her youth theatre.
“It was so cringey,” Tharia laughs. “It was about the last day of year 11 – all these kids realising that everyone has stuff in common. It was very edgy.” She switches to deadpan so quickly that it’s almost easy to miss the playful note in her voice: “It was really revolutionary. I think I started a wave in the theatre world.”
Credits
Writer: Anahit Behrooz
Photography: Jackson Bowley