Taylor-Joy has found her happy place
Actor enjoys being on a set — the messier the better, like for upcoming Viking film
Anya Taylor-Joy posted a brief Instagram video a few weeks ago during a car ride, her hair damp, her face smeared with dirt and her smile radiant as she laughed and announced, with a hint of astonishment, “Wow ... today was a very good day.” There were no words in the post’s caption, just a volcano emoji bracketed by two ice cubes.
Asked about the video, Taylor-Joy says, “That is genuinely, potentially, my happiest place,” and by “happiest place,” she does not mean Iceland, where the video was shot coming home from a recent day working on Robert Eggers’ latest movie, the Viking epic “The Northman,” nor does she necessarily mean a film set, though she will proclaim repeatedly she feels more at home working than she does at home or anyplace else.
Specifically, precisely, what Taylor-Joy wants to communicate is that her happiest place on earth is a movie set where she’s covered in grime and, with any luck, some kind of prosthetic blood, and where someone is challenging her to do something that’s physically hard so she can ignite the competitive spirit within herself and see how much she can endure. And that particular day in Iceland checked all those boxes, with the bonus of getting to swim around in the freezing North Atlantic. A very good day, indeed.
If this runs counter to the image you have of TaylorJoy from seeing her in all those chic statement coats,
turtlenecks and pleated skirts on “The Queen’s Gambit” or the perfect Regency-period costumes she wore in “Emma,” then you know her only from her work — which is all she wants to be known for at the moment, anyway. So that’s OK. But this is a young woman who likes to
get dirty, so much so that when she was making the new David O. Russell movie earlier this year and she met the man who created her favorite brand of fake blood, who revealed this fact as he was applying the fake blood to her body, well, she just lost her mind.
But, should you need
further confirmation, Nicole Kidman happily relates the first time she met Taylor-Joy, only at first she couldn’t believe it was Taylor-Joy because, having just arrived on the remote “Northman” set on top of a mountain in Northern Ireland, she saw a young woman, white as a ghost, dressed as a Viking, wearing no makeup, standing among hundreds of shivering extras.
“I thought, ‘Who’s that girl?’ ” Kidman said. “Then I take another look and, ‘Oh, that’s Anya!’ She’s in the mud, dressed in