A steely chameleon
Actress Taylor-joy making her mark with some dark, complicated characters
On the first day of shooting a new film version of Jane Austen’s Emma, the woman in the titular role, 23-year-old Anya Taylor-joy, decided to quit. It was January 2019, the actress raised in Argentina and London was in a taxi home, and her mind was turning over the 24 roles she had slipped into since her breakout role as Thomasin, a girl believed by her Puritan family to be possessed by the devil, in 2015’s critically acclaimed 17th-century folk-horror film The Witch.
Among them were the sexually abused teenager Casey, who gets kidnapped by a serial killer (James Mcavoy) in Split, superheroine Magik in X-men film The New Mutants and Lily, the rich college girl so bored she plots to murder her stepfather in Cory Finley’s esteemed indie thriller Thoroughbreds. She just finished playing Gina, the ballsy American in the new season of Peaky Blinders, and Brea, the puppet princess she voices in Louis Leterrier’s fantasy Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
She was soon scheduled to film Edgar Wright’s psychological horror Last Night in Soho.
Taylor-joy realized she had been in character for 360 out of the past 365 days, and wasn’t sure where these characters ended, and she, Anya, began.
“The best way to explain it,” she says, “is that I could go to an art gallery and I could tell you which pieces of art Lily would like, Thomasin would like, Casey would like. But what did I like? I didn’t know what was character and what was myself, and I’m still working that out.”
Taylor-joy seems nothing like the dark and complicated characters she presents on screen. She was six when she announced to her mother, an African-spanish psychologist, and her father, a Scottish-argentine powerboat racer, that she wanted to act. Ten years later, Kate Moss’s agent Sarah Doukas scouted her while Taylor-joy was walking her dog past Harrods department store and, a year after that, she was called in as an extra on Downton Abbey.
Taylor-joy has a near-photographic memory and describes herself as an empath. As a result, she doesn’t need to spend hours learning lines, and never researches a part — she simply makes each character a Spotify playlist.
From Thoroughbreds to The Witch, Taylor-joy’s CV reads like a cinephile’s must-watch list — until this year. Reviewers criticized her two most recent films — Glass and Playmobil: The Movie — as badly directed.
Taylor-joy may be an empath, but there is an unmistakable steeliness to her, as well. She swings long, dangly earrings with pro-feminist messaging, which she bought at the same time as a bracelet that denounces the patriarchy.
“Recently,” she says, “a producer was treating me like a little girl, like I didn’t know what I was talking about. So I sat him down in his office and, even though I was afraid that he was physically stronger than me, and that he could affect my career, I said, ‘I’ve made more films than you have, so, actually, I really do know what I’m talking about.’”