The first time it occurred to Mia Threapleton that acting was a job she might be able to do, she was seven years old. She was watching Bugsy Malone, a comic musical starring a 13-year-old Jodie Foster as a Chicago gangster. “I remember thinking: ‘That looks really fun and she’s really good and seems really cool. Is that something people can do that maybe I can do? Can I do that?’”

A few years later, once she had realised that her lack of aptitude for maths probably ruled out becoming a marine biologist, she had made her decision. She told her mother she was going to be an actor. “She said: ‘Oh really? Well, if that’s what you want to do, darling, definitely do it. It’s very hard work’.” Which stuck in her mind, she adds. “Because that’s the only advice she’s ever really given me. ‘Read the script as many times as you can.’ And ‘it’s really hard work’. And yes, it is, but that’s why I like it.”

It was reliable advice, given that Threapleton’s mother is Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet. That was, however, as far as any stage mothering went. Her mother’s career was not part of their family life; she had a home office, which was out of bounds, and a working life elsewhere.

Threapleton, whose father met her mother when he was assistant director on her 1998 film Hideous Kinky, says she could count on her hands the number of times she visited a film set before she was employed on one. She was also in her teens before she realised her mum was properly famous. Even now, she hasn’t seen many of Winslet’s films.

“As I got older, kids sort of knew who my mum was,” she says. “But no one ever commented. Sometimes they asked if I’d ever watched the car scene in Titanic and I’d say no.” When she was 12, she remembers, the film was playing on the family television. “That was the only scene I ever remember her going ‘Oh God!’ and covering my eyes! And I remember turning round and saying, ‘Mum, I can still hear it!’”

Which was certainly a triumphant teenage riposte, but put an end to that family viewing. “Till now, I’ve never seen that film all the way through,” she adds. “It’s a bit ewww, nah! But I honestly haven’t watched very many things she’s done.” She thinks about that, then name-checks Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “That one is really an amazing piece of artistry, on every level.”

In 2022, the pair appeared together in an episode of Channel 4’s I Am... series, as a mother and daughter navigating the perils of social media. When Winslet won the BAFTA for best actress, she paid tribute to Threapleton, saying “there were days when it was agony for her to dig as deeply as she did into very frightening emotional territory sometimes, and it took my breath away”.

Threapleton knew that her mother had achieved her career on her own; she didn’t have any strings to pull. She wanted to do the same. Once she had made her decision, she found websites listing auditions under her own steam and started putting herself forward for open castings. Looking back at the first few audition tapes she made, she sees how much she learned from that process.

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“It’s sad not to get the jobs you really want, but it’s fun in the first place and a great learning opportunity, to try new things and throw things at the wall and see what sticks.”

She looked for an agent only in her last year at school. “I really wanted to finish school, because I was very aware that this might not work out and I might need a contingency plan,” she says. “Also, I needed to do it for myself.” The week after she finished school, her new agent sent her a script.

“I read it and I was excited. I was quite exhausted as well, because the second year of A-levels was really difficult for me, but I’d made it. So I said then right, now’s the time to commit or it’s going to be shit. That’s kind of my life motto now. Commit or it’s shit. I think that’s actually something my mum said to me.”

A couple of weeks later, she was on the set of her first film, an Italian-Irish co-production called Shadows, which was a thrill; she was so green that she didn’t even know what a camera angle was. “How I came to be where I am now was entirely me-oriented. Nobody pushed me ... Nobody said ‘oh, you’d be good, you should do that’.”

Where she is now – exactly now – is the Cannes Film Festival, due to walk the red carpet with celebrated director Wes Anderson and a cohort of stars who feature regularly in his quirky, stylised comedies of very elaborate manners. Threapleton plays a leading role in his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, as Liesl, the disaffected daughter of a ruthless business tycoon, Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio del Toro.

Threapleton is still touchingly breathless at having worked with the stars Anderson regularly summons for his film-making summer camps, where cast and crew live and eat together for the duration of the shoot and Anderson sets out a table of films and books for them to watch and read as inspiration. They filmed at Babelsberg Studios and stayed in a hotel by one of Berlin’s pristine lakes, going swimming on days off. At the dinner table, she might find Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch, even Tom Hanks. She couldn’t believe, she said later, that she was there with Woody from Toy Story.

Like Anderson’s earlier film The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a story of unhappy families. Korda has just survived a sixth assassination attempt and decided it is time to hand over his empire to his only daughter, passing over his brood of witless sons. She will secure their fortune’s future by pushing through his pet project, a vast real-estate deal in a developing economy that is being passed off as economically benevolent and environmentally responsible. Liesl wants nothing to do with it. For one thing, she hasn’t seen her father in six years. And another thing: she’s now a nun.

In line with the rest of her self-driven career, Threapleton was chosen for the role on the basis of an audition tape, one of hundreds sent in response to a casting call. In an interview in Vanity Fair, Anderson said her reading stood out from a very large pack. “She was clearly really thinking about every moment. She just seemed completely authentic,” he said. “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.”

It might surprise fans of Anderson’s arch, meticulously constructed meta-worlds to read that he wanted someone who seemed real, especially after seeing Threapleton as Liesl. When she isn’t speaking, her face is set in an expression of mute resistance; her movements are not so much robotic as geometric, so that she seems to click into position. Her voice, uncannily like her mother’s, is clear and clipped. She is like the most Andersonian character ever to be in an Anderson film, to the manner born.

What she says Anderson wanted from her, however, was a kind of naturalism. “When I did my first audition tape, I had a feeling of how I wanted to do it: in the way that makes the most sense to me. And that, it turns out, was what Wes wanted when it came to filming.” He would regularly tell her to be simple, more natural; on one occasion, he spotted her between takes standing with her hands on her hips and jumped out to tell her to hold that stance.

“It was just very casual, very matter-of-fact,” she says. He does a huge number of takes, she discovered; on the first day, when they just shot little extra moments, they did 69. “And that turned out to be a middle ground. Because he knows exactly what he wants – and he’s questing to find that. And then he finds new things as we go, so they get added in. It’s quite orchestral, in a way. A bit more of this, less of that, then all together.”

Liesl’s ramrod back was one aspect of the character that came naturally to her. “I stand up quite straight anyway because I’m five foot three, so everyone’s taller than me. Her physicality and body positioning isn’t actually dissimilar from my own. Her stillness and steadiness and precision: that was something that ended up happening after I had the costume on. Partly because I refused to sit down in it when we weren’t filming. The material, I could see, was going to crease instantly.”

Funny, that’s just the kind of thing you would expect from her down-to-earth mother, concerned not to create more unnecessary ironing. The two women have a similar sort of boisterous physicality, too. As a child, says Threapleton, she wanted to be George in The Famous Five. “I was forever climbing trees; my knees were filthy as a kid. And I wanted to have Timmy the dog! I do now have a dog, so I do feel like George. It’s a little dream that came true, I guess.”

Her mother would lead the charge on weekend walks, setting a cracking marching pace, through local fields or on trips further to the countryside. “I now do that myself on a much more extreme level,” she says. “I love that. That’s my little escape. Long distance, camping, taking the dog for a week and just walking around different places. Having little adventures, finding the places where nobody goes. I’m really happy with my own company.”

That cheerful confidence doesn’t quite extend, however, to the formidable rituals of the Cannes Film Festival. We spoke before The Phoenician Scheme’s premiere, accompanied by the pomp and ceremony that this festival, more than any other, has preserved from a previous era. At least she would be walking the red carpet with a crowd, given that Anderson’s team would all be there. “It’s terrifying, absolutely terrifying,” she said. “But I will be fine, doing a lot of deep breathing and concentrating on not falling over my own feet going up those stairs.”

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The first time she saw The Phoenician Scheme, she told Vanity Fair, she was able to see it alone in a theatre: a special screening for the star. She admitted that she cried all the way through. After the Cannes screening, as the camera covering the now traditional standing ovation was focused on each of the film’s team in turn, we saw that she once again had tears running down her face. People were applauding; people were applauding her. She tried to wipe the tears away, but her face kept crumpling. And it was an emotional moment. For Mia Threapleton, stardom had arrived.

The Phoenician Scheme opens in cinemas on May 29.

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