Mia Wasikowska, who stars as Alice Kingsley in Tim Burton‘s world of Alice in Wonderland, is featured on the cover and in the pages of Teen Vogue magazine. Mia shows off her daring new, short hair’do in a batch of absolutely gorgeous photos and in her coverstory interview talks about her role in Wonderland, which opens in theaters on March 5. Here is Mia‘s coverphoto and some excerpts form the coverstory article:

The original story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins with a bored little girl making the ill-considered decision to follow a foppish rabbit down a very steep hole. As she falls (and falls), she ponders whether cats eat bats and considers what life is like in Australia, where she imagines that people “walk with their heads downwards” and where she expects—given the duration of her tumble—that she might very well end up. So perhaps it’s only fitting that the tale of Mia Wasikowska (pronounced Vah-shee-kov-ska), the 20-year-old Australian actress who’s been picked to star in a new big-screen adaptation of the classic book, starts in what Brits call the Antipodes. Like Alice, young Mia was at loose ends, looking around for something fun to do, when she set her sights on distant Hollywood. The ex-ballerina daughter of two visual artists was attracted to filmmaking because of the opportunity she felt it would afford her to “express a feeling” without having to worry, as she did in dance, about achieving physical perfection first. Not that Mia didn’t have other concerns: Although she was only fourteen, she felt positively over-the-hill. “I thought, Oh, what’s the point, I’m much too old to start acting,” she reports with a giggle. ” ‘Everybody who is an actor has been acting since they were three.’ ” Nevertheless, she began telephoning talent agents in Sydney, about 150 miles from her native Canberra, and when one finally answered, she made an appointment. “I was really adamant,” she explains. “I was trying to make it work.” And so she did. By her seventeenth birthday, Mia had starred in several Australian features and was shooting In Treatment, the HBO series that constituted her first big break. As Sophie, a suicidal teenage gymnast, she was a revelation; spellbinding subsequent turns in 2008′s Defiance and last year’s That Evening Sun (which earned her a nomination for a Film Independent Spirit Award) proved that she was anything but a one-part wonder. Now, with this month’s release of director Tim Burton’s 3-D spin on Alice in Wonderland—in which Mia appears opposite Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, and Helena Bonham Carter—she’s on the verge of becoming very well known.

After the jump, check out more from Mia‘s Teen Vogue article and check out a batch of beautiful photos from her accompanying spread …

“Alice is such a high-profile character,” She says, slipping her stocking feet out of her secondhand oxford shoes and tucking her legs underneath her. She’s sipping coffee and eating butter cookies in the lobby of a quiet Portland, Oregon, hotel. “One of the things that was scary about taking on that role is the huge fan base; everybody has their own idea of who she is. So [Tim and I] discussed, very early on, just being happy with her being our Alice … making her my own.” It will likely help that the movie’s plot doesn’t hew too tightly to that of the book. According to Mia, “Alice is nineteen, and she returns to Wonderland with no recollection of having been there before. I really think it will be exciting, especially for girls my age because it explores that period of your life when you have these expectations upon you and you’re finding that, amongst that, you have to try and hold on to yourself” … On camera, she’s about to take on one of the biggest love stories of all time, having won the title role in a new version of Jane Eyre (opposite Inglourious Basterds’ Michael Fassbender). “I’m completely excited,” she says, as if there were any room for doubt. “As a teenager I was very anxious. I had a lot of energy and passion that I wanted to channel into creative things, and I always felt like I wasn’t achieving enough.” Now that she’s indubitably getting her chance, Mia says she’s “probably mellowed,” but she’s not about to rest on her laurels. Critical acclaim and a couple of star-making projects represent, for the actress, not a happy ending so much as a very felicitous start.

I just LOVE this girl. I became a fan of hers from HBO‘s In Treatment and am SO exicted to see her in Alice in Wonderland. I’m actually ashamed to admit that I’ve never read the Alice books by Lewis Carroll so just last night I picked up a beautifully bound volume of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at Barnes & Noble last night so I can hopefully get them read before the movie opens next month. From what I’ve seen of Mia‘s work thus far, she is an amazing actress … I see big things in her future. These photos are just beautiful. We are just about 1 month away from Alice in Wonderland, y’all!! Woot!!

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