Mia Wasikowska, 19-year-old Aussie actress, is officially Tim Burton's Alice in 'Alice in Wonderland'.
The Canberra born teenager will star with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in director Tim Burton's version of "Alice and Wonderland". The movies' first excerpts will open in both 3-D and regular screen versions in March 2010, were released Monday, and Burton's unique style is apparent.
Wasikowska has been picked to play the plumb role of Alice, who is 17 in Burton's realisation of the classic fantasy book by Lewis Carroll (the heroine of the book is a younger girl).
Burton said of his choice, "We met a lot of people, but she just had that certain kind of emotional toughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person with a younger person's mentality," as quoted by English paper, MailOnline.
Wasikowska will actually be familiar to fans of the HBO show "In Treatment," in which she played Sophie, a patient of Gabriel Byrne's psychotherapist, during the series' debut season in 2008. Wasikowska may be the only actor in the film who approaches anything like her normal appearance.
Johnny Depp will sport bright-red hair worthy of Bozo the Clown as the Mad Hatter, while brunette Anne Hathaway goes platinum blond to play the White Queen.
Many of the actors' faces will be digitally altered, but Burton's real-life romantic partner Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen actually gets her head swollen thanks to computer enhancement, as an outward symbol of her character's outsize ego.