MIA WASIKOWSKA, the middle child of two Canberra photographers, is about to be unleashed upon the world with all the publicity muscle Disney can muster.

The pixieish 20-year-old stars as Alice in Tim Burton’s new 3D movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter.

“He was fantastic,” Wasikowska said of Depp yesterday. “He plays these crazy characters but he gives them this core humanity and heart, which is why … they have a gravity to them. You end up … caring about them. I think that’s why he’s [such a] genius.”

While other characters from Lewis Carroll’s book appear (including Tweedledum and Tweedledee, played by Matt Lucas from Little Britain) the film’s story is different. Alice is 19, returning to Wonderland to find her feet as an adult. Helena Bonham Carter’s evil red queen has taken over the place.

As for her on-screen kissing prowess, Anne revealed that she has a lot to learn from another top-name Hollywood actress- Angelina Jolie.
“It’s a totally different experience. But really you have to be Angelina Jolie to pull that off and still look good. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I ain’t no Angie.”

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Helena Bonham Carter fancies a drink. So she orders a double ­espresso. And a glass of fizzy water. And an apple smoothie. She looks rather ­worried when I order just a coffee. “Is that all you want?” she asks gently. Multiple drinking, she explains, is the way to a balanced diet. She admits her theory is not based on pure science.

We are in the cafe just down the road from her north London home. She says she’s got something to show me, and produces a freaky cardboard ­cutout of a little woman with a huge, hydro­encephalised head. “I’ve brought myself. It’s me… in Alice.” Alice In Wonderland is the ­latest movie she has made with her partner, ­director Tim ­Burton. This is their sixth ­collaboration, and ­possibly the grandest ­(it’s certainly the most ­expensive, at an estimated $250m). It’s classic Burton territory – a fairytale world where adulthood is never quite attained, and innocence trails a ghoulish stench. Bonham Carter is playing nasty – a cross between the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts. She holds up her cardboard self and ­addresses it. “She’s got Tourette’s. She just says, ‘Off with their heads!’ all the time.”

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“ALICE IN WONDERLAND”: 29 DAYS

Are you ready for a trip down the rabbit hole? Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Disney are adding a strange new chapter to the Lewis Carroll classic with “Alice in Wonderland,” a film that presents a young woman who finds herself in the world of the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen. She is welcomed as a returning visitor — but is she in fact the same Alice who roamed the trippy realm as a child? Time will tell. Here at the Hero Complex we’re counting down to the film’s March 5 release with daily coverage. Today it’s a conversation with Mia Wasikowska, the 20-year-old Aussie newcomer who plays the title role.

Geoff Boucher: The film is called “Alice in Wonderland,” but really this is neither a pure adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s writings nor a remake of previous films. This is a whole new story, correct?

Mia Wasikowska: It’s a completely different and new story, but it has a lot of the same characters in it. It has the same feel of the original stories, but it’s really fun to explore a story that goes further and imagines what all these characters would be like several years down the tracks. Alice doesn’t have a recollection of her first visit there. She’s gone back and is discovering this world and finding herself again in this place that she doesn’t even remember.

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In 1984, Paul Reubens was looking for a director. The film in development was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and Reubens, who had been working on the perversely juvenile conceptual-art project for about 15 years, was desperate to find someone he could trust to direct it with style. So, as people in Los Angeles do, he asked around at a party. One of the guests had just seen Frankenweenie—Tim Burton’s 1984 live-action short about a dog that is brought back to life. Burton had no previous experience as a feature-film director, but the two men immediately bonded. Only 25 at the time, Burton got the job, and the pair watched as their strange but imaginative film earned more than $40 million at the box office.

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Mia Wasikowska, 20, is the daughter of a Polish photographer mother and an Australian painter-and-collagist father. Her breakthrough on the HBO series In Treatment, as the fragile and yet fierce gymnast Sophie, suggested a deep intelligence and a reservoir of talent. Director Edward Zwick cast her in Defiance, about a group of Polish Jews banding together to escape the Nazis. Next she will play the title role in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, the love interest in Gus Van Sant’s next film, and the daughter of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, two gay moms, in Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right.

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In 1983, Johnny Depp, the lead guitarist at the time in The Kids rock band, left south Broward for Hollywood, Calif., looking for a record deal. Instead, Depp, 21 at the time these pictures were taken, wound up in the movies. Photographer Debbie Blaylock photographed Depp while back in South Florida for the opening of his debut movie, Nightmare on Elm Street. Depp attended Miramar High School, but never participated in drama groups.

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