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Everyone’s talking about Anya Taylor-Joy’s addictive chess prodigy series The Queen’s Gambit – so why don’t you...
When the crusty old janitor tells nine-year-old Beth Harmon, newly arrived at Methuen orphans’ home in the 1950s, that little girls don’t play chess, she’s determined to prove him wrong. And boy, does she. No sooner has he taught her the moves on the board than she’s beating men who’ve been playing for decades. By the time she’s in her teens the chess prodigy is being interviewed by glossy magazines, and at 22 she’s a world champion.
But along the way her life spirals out of control as she struggles with the isolation of living inside her own head and an addiction to drugs and alcohol.
The story of Beth – shy, orphaned tragically young and sent to an establishment where she fails to fit in – resonated with Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the older Beth in the Netflix adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit.
Not that she’s an orphan – her English-Spanish psychologist-turned-housewife mother and Scottish-Argentinian banker father are very much around. Yet Anya’s five siblings are far older than her, which made it a lonely early childhood. And then when she was six her family moved from Buenos Aires to London and she went to school knowing hardly any English.
‘I felt so alone, unseen and different from everyone else,’ says Anya. ‘I felt there was something wrong with me because I belonged everywhere but didn’t belong anywhere enough. When I read the book I felt so many parallels with Beth.’
While Beth finds comfort in the world of chess, Anya retreated into the world of her imagination. ‘I didn’t have real contact with other kids, so I’d create witches and magical beings who were my friends,’ she recalls. ‘I’d make up plays about them. But luckily there’s this thing called acting, which means I’m not crazy but I get to do that as a profession.’
She has made a staggering 16 films and appeared in six TV series since her debut in 2015 horror movie The Witch, including a season as gangster’s moll Gina Gray in Peaky Blinders. In 2019 alone she went from playing Jane Austen’s imperious heroine in Emma to starring as an aspiring singer in Edgar Wright’s upcoming horror film Last Night In Soho and then to making The Queen’s Gambit.
She says that before taking on the role of Beth she’d never even played chess. ‘I felt so grateful that I was introduced to this secret world by some of the greats of the game. There’s a beauty in any group of people loving something so much that they want to dedicate their life to it.’
A darker theme in the series is addiction, which Beth develops after being fed tranquillisers at the orphanage, a practice that was used at the time to make children easier to deal with. ‘My brain was blown when I discovered that in the 50s and 60s that was acceptable,’ she says.
Now 24, Anya’s grown immeasurably from the lonely little girl who couldn’t work out which nationality she really was. ‘Now, I’m comfortable just being me.’