Anya Taylor-Joy
On The Queen’s Gambit and her incredible 2021 slate…
Thank you very, very much, I’m so honoured!” beams Total Film’s Woman Of The Year Anya Taylor-Joy. It’s late November and she’s Zooming from her apartment in Northern Ireland, where she’s currently filming 10th Century Viking drama The Northman alongside Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård and Willem Dafoe. Its director, Robert Eggers, launched her career in 2015 with The Witch, and Taylor-Joy is having the time of her life being put through her paces out in the elements.
“What Robert Eggers movie is not a tough, physical shoot?” she laughs, having no doubt compared notes with The Lighthouse’s Dafoe. “But after being cooped in for a really long time, my favourite bit is that we get to spend so much time outside. And in terms of world-building… We get overwhelmed sometimes. It’s magical. And Robert writes very interesting characters. I’ve never been interested in playing somebody that doesn’t scare me. But she also feels like, ‘Ooh, I want to say these words. Just let me at it.’”
The Northman is a treat in waiting, but TaylorJoy has been chosen as TF’s WOTY because of her formidable work in 2020. She was splendid as the title character in Emma, the best thing about The New Mutants, and simply stunned as chess protégé Beth Harmon in Scott Frank’s ’60s-set Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. It was arguably the water-cooler show of the year – if people still gathered around water coolers – and Taylor-Joy, who had never before played chess, fully inhabited brilliant, lost, oddball Beth.
“From the second I opened the script, I just felt seen, and I felt I could see her back,” she says. “We’re very similar in some ways. I think we were both desperate to find a place that we could contribute something. We both did not fit into the situation we’d been born into. We didn’t fit in with peers the same age. And the inherent loneliness. Beth’s unable to connect with the people around her because she’s in her own mind and isolated. I felt that desperately as a kid. I get very emotional at the Henry Clay High School scene where Beth sees a chess tournament for the first time, because that feeling for her is the same feeling I had on The Witch on my first day. I just found hope.”
She’s never looked back. And looking forward, it’s only getting better, with Edgar Wright’s psychological horror Last Night In Soho in the can (“I have a deep appreciation of horror. There’s lightness and darkness in every person, and I’m interested in excavating that dark aspect”) and the aforementioned The Northman shooting. And then it’s Miller time, for the Untitled George Miller Furiosa spin-off is gearing up with Taylor-Joy in the driving seat as a younger version of Charlize Theron’s badass road warrior. So will she be doing her own stunts?
“I’ve never wanted to do anything halfway, and I have been looking forward to a role like this for my whole life,” she grins. “So yes, I will be doing as much as I can physically do.”
THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT IS STREAMING NOW ON NETFLIX.