The Croisette glittered a little brighter on Sunday night as Mia Threapleton, a fresh comet streaking across Hollywood’s constellation, made her Cannes Film Festival debut. At 24, she stepped onto the crimson tide of the Palais’ carpet not as a footnote to her mother’s legacy, but as the luminous center of The Phoenician Scheme—Wes Anderson’s latest labyrinth of whimsy and wit.
Clad in an emerald Oscar de la Renta confection—strapless, swirling with gold embroidery like gilded vines—Threapleton seemed to conjure the ghost of Kate Winslet’s 1998 Oscar-night glory. Yet this was no homage, but a declaration: a new era, stitched in her own sequins.
In the film, Threapleton plays Sister Liesl, a nun-in-training thrust into the shark tank of inheritance when her father (Benicio del Toro’s wounded kingpin) survives an assassination. The role pits piety against power, with Anderson’s signature dollhouse aesthetic as the stage. Surrounding her? A murderers’ row of talent: Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, and Riz Ahmed, all spinning in this absurdist carousel.
The premiere erupted in a standing ovation so prolonged, Threapleton’s tears threatened to outshine the chandeliers. “I sat on my hands,” she admitted later, recalling her disbelief at sharing scenes with legends. “Bryan Cranston asked me to pass the salt. I nearly passed out.”
Despite the whispers of
Threapleton has clawed her way through indies and TV (The Buccaneers, I Am Ruth) with the grit of a sculptor chiseling marble. “I wanted to do it alone,” she insists—and Cannes, that glitzy gatekeeper, seems to agree.
Anderson’s fourth Cannes contender opens stateside May 30, but the real show has already begun: the birth of a star who refuses to be eclipsed.
