FROM HORROR TO HILARITY
Indie darling Taylor-joy finds her sense of humour as Austen heroine
As a suspected witch in Puritan New England, Anya Taylor-joy holds her tears back out of indignation. As an abducted teenager, she allows them to silently stream down her face as she stares at her captor. As a devious high schooler perfecting a fake sob, she mimics the experience of choking.
The 23-year-old actress makes a point of differentiating her crying technique in every film.
Each character she embodies is an entirely different human being, she said, and if she ever sees “a flash of Anya, that upsets me because ... I want them to stand alone.”
As Emma Woodhouse, the Jane Austen heroine, Taylor-joy weeps out of selfishness before she breaks down due to true heartbreak. Emma. (which has a period as part of its title — because, as the filmmaker has said “it’s a period film.”) is the directorial debut of photographer Autumn de Wilde, who puts her own spin on the oft-adapted novel by injecting it with the DNA of a screwball comedy.
As such, crying isn’t all Taylor-joy, an indie darling for her work in such horror-thrillers as The Witch and Thoroughbreds, was tasked with switching up. Her latest project called for a sense of humour she has rarely had the opportunity to exhibit at this level. That’s just how her career turned out, Taylor-joy said, as she never set out to make her name in a specific genre, but instead chooses projects for challenging stories and characters. Growing up in
England, she was keenly aware of Emma. She first read the novel at 11 years old, again at 15 and once more before shooting the film, when “there were elements of Emma’s theatricality that really jumped out at me.”
Like much of Austen’s work, the new movie version satirizes upper-class society, centring on a “handsome, clever and rich” 20-year-old who has vowed to never marry and instead lives alone with her hypochondriac father (Bill Nighy).
She spends her time matchmaking — though her neighbour and close confidant George Knightley (Johnny Flynn) would likely refer to it as interfering. Such as in the case of her fawning companion Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) and the local vicar Philip Elton (Josh O’connor), Emma’s efforts to set up her friends and acquaintances are generally well-intentioned but often misguided.
In preparing her pitch, de Wilde thought to present producers with her dream cast to capture “some very specific ideas for how I saw the characters.”
As an established rock photographer who has toured with such musicians as Beck, Death Cab for Cutie and the White Stripes, she found herself drawing similarities between the frenetic, contained setting of Emma’s small town and, unexpectedly, that of a tour bus.
“Everyone’s young and full of passion, and mistakes are made,” she said.
“Things are glorious, and there’s a lot of drama ... I know it sounds weird to use the word, but a real rock star also presents themselves as foolish and untethered, and then the king of the world, and then exhausted and overwhelmed and fragile ... I wanted to bring that through the actors and their performances.”
De Wilde focused on presenting a “complicated heroine,” or one who would be unlikable at times. She needed an actress who could “handle the untying of Emma,” who could go from pompous to vulnerable and back again. Taylor-joy had displayed a complexity of emotion in her horror work, transforming from seeming victims into twisted anti-heroes.
“That was remarkable to me,” de Wilde said. “It also proved to me that she was a ‘story first’ actor, not a ‘pretty first’ actor.
“She obviously has this stunning beauty, but I could really tell that she abandoned all thoughts of how she looked to really grasp hold of a character.”
While aspects of Emma resonate with Taylor-joy, she doesn’t approach projects looking for similarities.
Emma’s tears — which serve a more redemptive purpose than those of Taylor-joy’s other characters — were shaped by a lesson the actress learned shooting a crying scene for the psychological horror film Split, during which director M. Night Shyamalan “completely changed” her acting style.
“I did the scene and Night very sweetly came up to me and said, ‘Anya, that was beautiful, but I’ve seen you cry like this. Don’t be selfish, give the character her own tears,’” Taylor-joy said.
“That had a profound effect on me ... I’m sure people do it differently and every way is valid, but I can’t cry as a character because of something that’s happened to me. I have to cry from a place of empathy.”
I can’t cry as a character because of something that’s happened to me. I have to cry from a place of empathy.
ANYA TAYLOR-JOY