Getting famous during a pandemic. "Starring in "The Witch" and "The
Queen's Gambit." Anya Taylor-Joy has taken over Hollywood and here's why!
Anya Taylor-Joy didn't have the easiest childhood. While she did great in school, thriving in
drama classes, English, and the classics, Taylor-Joy told the Evening Standard in 2017,
"The kids just didn't understand me in any shape or form,
and I was really badly bullied. I used to get locked in lockers,
you know, barred from classrooms, not invited to things. It wasn't pleasant."
Considering why this hurt so much as a child, Taylor-Joy added,
"We're social creatures, and we don't do well when we're not accepted,
or when we feel like we don't belong anywhere."
While it's unfortunate that Taylor-Joy had to go through this as a child,
she reflected as an adult that the loneliness of her childhood made her
understand the character of Beth Harmon in "The Queen's Gambit" better. This allowed the star
to transform childhood tragedy into character relatability. She said to Style in March 2021,
"I saw a lot of parallels between the two of us. Beth is an inherently lonely person,
and that was something I definitely struggled with growing up. She's
desperately looking for a place where she fits in and where she feels like
she can contribute something. For her, that's chess, and for me, it's acting."
"The new champ."
"Hi."
With such an unusual childhood, filled with travel and change, Anya Taylor-Joy seems
comfortable uprooting her life and making big moves. While speaking with the Evening Standard,
she explained how she used her savings to move to New York at 14, before deciding to quit school
two years later to focus on acting. Noting that her family was scared for her, she said,
"All of my brothers and sisters called me to tell me I was ruining my life. I cried hysterically."
Taylor-Joy added that being the youngest of six kids gave her a preternatural confidence
that she used to her advantage. She told the Evening Standard,
"I think because my siblings are so much older than me, I grew up around adults and I never
thought of myself as a child. My parents raised me as if they always trusted me."
She rose to this trust and her huge risk paid off when she was discovered.
Anya Taylor-Joy is now a major Hollywood player. She's played Gina Gray in the TV
series "Peaky Blinders" and Emma Woodhouse in the 2019 adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma." She was
also the character of Illyana Rasputin in the 2020 film, "The New Mutants." But her big Hollywood
breakthrough came when she nabbed the role of Thomasin in the 2015 film "The Witch." Taylor-Joy
described when she first watched herself in the movie to the Evening Standard, saying,
"I saw myself on screen for the first time and I was terrified.
I was convinced I would never act again. I never actually figured that I couldn't act."
Of course, this proved to be very far from the truth, and Taylor-Joy has gone on to
play a whole panoply of characters. She said at the 2020 Golden Globes,
"Each character is such a gift. Each one has been so individual and has had such
a different way of arriving. There's a moment where everything clicks and
just suddenly you are that person. But I couldn't say that one is more
rewarding or more taxing 'cause I put all of myself into each one of them."
While "The Witch" might have been her big breakthrough, it was "The Queen's
Gambit" that put Anya Taylor-Joy on the map in a global way. The series earned
her a Golden Globe in 2021, which also marked her first major award. In fact,
Taylor-Joy became the first Latina to win in the category of best actress in a limited series,
anthology series, or a motion picture made for television, according to Variety.
Ironically, for Anya Taylor-Joy, the moment she skyrocketed to fame was
during the COVID-19 pandemic. It sounds counterintuitive,
but everyone was cooped up at home and what became an instant favorite on Netflix? "The
Queen's Gambit." Everyone wanted to know who brought the wide-eyed Beth Harmon to life.
"All of this happened during lockdown. So
the craziest thing was I was just kind of in my house."
While the pandemic made her an international sensation,
it was also a transformative time for Taylor-Joy. She told Tatler that she was
filming "The Northman" when everything shut down, and she had to go stay at her home in
London and face a completely different reality from the one she had previously known. She said,
"I do think there's a specific period of time between the ages of 18 and 25 when you are
so malleable. And because I was pouring so much energy into understanding [my characters], I was
like a vase being filled with different colored liquids and I had no concept of who I was."
She said that the solitude and slowness allowed her to carve out personal time,
something she hadn't had in a long time.
Anya Taylor-Joy has hit the jackpot with TV and film gigs, but she still has some dreams
on her horizon, namely in people she wants to work with and what she wants to do. At
the 2020 Golden Globes, Taylor-Joy talked about working on Spanish language projects. She shared,
"I have always wanted to work with Guillermo del Toro. I feel his relationship with the
supernatural is very much like mine. He understands my brain and my heart very
well. So I would love to work with him [...] I am just waiting for the right project. It
needs to be something special because it's a very special part of my life,
it's a very special part of my soul. Spanish is my first language."
But Taylor-Joy has other dream collaborations. In 2016, she told The Hollywood Reporter:
"I would love to work with [Quentin] Tarantino. I'd
love to work with the Coen brothers. And Steven Spielberg. 'E.T.' was big for me."
If her past is any pattern to base projections,
it looks like Taylor-Joy will get everything she wants — and we'll be here to watch it!
While most actors have a hard time finding work, Anya Taylor-Joy had
the opposite problem. She's had so much work that she's needed to slow down. For instance,
she had one day off between filming "Emma" and "Last Night in Soho." Taylor-Joy told
Tatler how she managed it and why this wasn't working. She explained,
"I survived on Diet Coke, cigarettes, and coffee,
and by the end of it, I was like, 'I need to eat a vegetable.'"
Taylor-Joy admitted that it can sometimes create a feeling of missing out, saying,
"It can be difficult when you're 'young' to not feel guilty about
not doing things that other 25-year-olds are doing and that can be a bit of a headf--k."
She's been so busy that while filming "Peaky Blinders," Taylor-Joy wasn't even able to be
in the scenes with her co-stars. She was filming "Amsterdam" in Los Angeles
while Finn Cole was in England. She told The Hollywood Reporter,
"And so we actually did a lot of our scenes not together. It was just me acting to empty space
and watching a scene that Finn had done and trying to do my reaction based off of that,
which was a really interesting way of working."
On "The Late Late Show with James Corden," Taylor-Joy spoke about exhaustion.
"I haven't slept since I was seven."
She spoke in praise of white noise apps and confessed to loving whale sounds to
fall asleep. After that grueling schedule, if whale sounds work, then whales it is!
Part of becoming an A-lister meant that Anya
Taylor-Joy began dealing with paparazzi and approaching strangers. In some cases,
these encounters were harmless while others have been scary. She told Tatler,
"Most people are sweet and kind and just want to have a conversation, and I love that."
Unfortunately, not all of her encounters have led to pleasant exchanges, saying,
"Well, there are other times when you're just one person facing off against 20 and
that's just physically not safe. It can be very frightening when there are whole
bunches of men with cameras attached to their faces running after you down the street."
She had a particularly bad experience in New York, which left her in tears,
but after taking a pause, she came up with an idea, as she explained,
"The next morning I went out and I said, 'Hello,
my name is Anya. Let's lower down the camera and let's meet.' I am not prey. I don't want to run."
Her goal was to get the engagement to a place where they could do their job
without her feeling scared. But the happy fans are her favorite part. On
"The Graham Norton Show," Taylor-Joy said that "The Queen's Gambit" brought
forward a delightful mix-match of fans, especially the disparity between ages.
"You have like really little kids that love it and
then you have like 87-year-old people that are like Beth, and I love that."
Chess seems to bring everyone together.
One of the more curious projects that Anya Taylor-Joy has ever worked on was
the 2022 film "The Menu," starring alongside Ralph Fiennes, Hong Chau,
and Nicholas Hoult. The curious horror movie takes place at an exclusive restaurant on a tiny island,
so the guests are trapped and at the mercy of Fiennes' character, celebrity Chef Julian
Slowik. It sounds tame enough, but the film is dazzling in its unexpected plot direction,
and Taylor-Joy is a marvel as Margot. In a breakdown of the scenes with Vanity Fair,
Taylor-Joy raved about how much she loved her character and the movie itself. She said,
"I love Margot very, very much. Because she is the character that I've played that's the most
comfortable in their skin. I've never been a particularly passive aggressive person,
and I deeply enjoyed being passive aggressive."
Taylor-Joy also spoke about the delight of working with
legend Fiennes, telling The Hollywood Reporter,
"He's just beautiful in every way. He's such a talented actor in that whatever
he wants to transmute onto the screen, he will achieve it in spades. Maybe it was
because of the characters we were playing or the relationship that we have, but I just find him
deeply comforting. I feel very comfortable and taken care of when I'm with Ralph."
She said that at their core, both of their characters were outsiders,
and it created a bond while filming.
Anya Taylor-Joy found love in a fellow reader. She began dating musician and actor Malcolm
McRae in May 2021, per People, and they became really official when they kissed
in public at "The Northman" premiere. During an interview with British Vogue,
Taylor-Joy discussed their relationship — a very literary one at that! She said,
"I said to my partner the other day that he
was my hobby. I see reading as something that I have to do."
The interviewer asked how McRae reacted to that statement. Taylor-Joy clarified,
"He loved it because he's the same. I've finally found someone who will happily sit in silence
with me reading. We're basically 80 years old and seven at the same time and it works really well."
On his Instagram page in March 2022, he posted a song and added the caption,
"I wrote this song for Anya two days after meeting her. It's called 'Really Want to See You Again.'"
If that's not romantic, we don't know what is. The lyrics go,
"I think we're alike in ways that I can't quite explain right, but I might,
could with some time. If ever we were in the same place. I want what's right,
but I want without warning now, and I think we're wanting something the same."
So music was obviously the magic touch.