There’s a clip of actress Mia Goth speaking a snippet of Portuguese at the premiere of her latest Ti West collaboration, MaXXXine, that’s made the rounds in the past week, not because of anything notable said or done in the video but because it serves as yet another reminder that she really does have a crazy voice. It happens with each new release of a Goth film (Pearl, Infinity Pool, anything): Collective society remembers that when she speaks, she sounds like a portrait of a child who has been cursed to come to life.
It doesn’t matter so much whether Goth sounds like that in whatever project she’s promoting (she often doesn’t) or whether her voice tenor is real or not, it’s that she genuinely doesn’t sound like anyone else in the industry. In an interview with W, Goth claims her voice sounds like this due to anxiety; fair enough, though I know many anxious people who don’t sound like the little creatures on Fantasmas. We can’t pin all our hopes of vocal distinction on Goth, especially not in light of the details of her alleged abusive behavior on set of MaXXXine, therefore it must be said: We need more actors who have crazy and distinctive voices.
This transcends the nature of an actor being able to do accents (sorry to Jodie Comer) or having an easily recognizable voice (sorry to Awkwafina). This is about an actor’s natural or as close-to-natural speaking voice being a trademark sound or tenor, the type of thing that when you hear it, you have to remind yourself that it’s a real thing happening and not a manipulation of sound the way that sometimes a pop star will sample a baby-voiced version of themselves on a track.
Of course, Goth isn’t alone in the current landscape of crazy voices: We have one of this summer’s other stars, Austin Butler, still loping around with the ghost of Elvis inside him, using him like a ventriloquist dummy. A Butler press cycle is fun not only because of the actor’s flirty intensity but because of the sheer pleasure of remembering that he sounds like that. Similarly, Adam Driver’s low, strange vocal wobble always surprises, whether he’s filtering it through an Italian accent or not. And in the midst of the vocal-fry white-noise machine that is Madame Web, you’ll always know when you’re hearing the high-strung plucking of Zosia Mamet’s voice.
Modern movie stars have lost those vocal eccentricities that used to be more common on the big screen in favor of a broadcast-news-style ubiquity. Though they might carry some regional accents as a token of home, these performers largely have flat, medium-pitched voices that reflect an upper-middle-class suburban quality. Sometimes this is coincidence; sometimes it’s just because everyone is from the middle of California. To listen back to movies from 20 or 40 or 60 years ago is to hear a whole symphony of voices, as best exemplified yesterday as people celebrated the fairy-tale flutter of the recently passed Shelley Duvall. In reality, any gathering of actors on a red carpet should sound like an episode of The Muppet Show, rich and textured with accents and rasp and buoyancy and pitch, reminding us that what we see on the screen is a performance. No actor is truly normal (they probably wouldn’t be an actor if so), and their voices ought to reflect that eccentricity. Witnessing a woman who sounds like a haunted doll is one perk of going to the movies, but imagine if there was a whole shelf of them — sitting, poised, ready to speak.