Anya Taylor-Joy

Anya Taylor-Joy (born April 16, 1996, Miami, Florida, U.S.) is an actress who broke through with her lauded performance in the 2015 horror film The Witch and became an international star with the lead role in the Netflix period drama miniseries The Queen’s Gambit (2020). David O. Russell, who directed Taylor-Joy in the movie Amsterdam (2022), summed up her appeal to Vanity Fair in 2021: “She is different and strange in ways that are fascinating.”

Early life

Taylor-Joy, the youngest of six children, was born to a cosmopolitan family in Miami. Her mother, Jennifer Marina Joy, was born in Zambia and is of English and Spanish descent, while Taylor-Joy’s father, Dennis Taylor, has a Scottish and Argentine background. Soon after Taylor-Joy was born, the family moved to Argentina where Taylor-Joy’s mother was a psychologist and her father was a banker. Six years later, the family moved to London, but Taylor-Joy refused to learn to speak English until she was 8 years old. At age 16 she convinced her parents to allow her to leave school, and she was soon discovered by a modeling scout.

First roles and The Witch

Taylor-Joy had known since she was young that she wanted to become an actress, and she saw modeling as a gateway to the screen. She soon made her acting debut, in 2014, with brief appearances in the television shows Vampire Academy and Endeavour. The following year she landed a part in The Witch, a supernatural horror film about a family tormented by black magic while living in the New England wilderness in the 1630s. The small-budget film performed well at festivals and was a critical success, with many reviewers noting Taylor-Joy’s strong performance as the eldest daughter who is actively pursued as a recruit of a malevolent coven. In early 2016 The New Yorker wrote that “Taylor-Joy is remarkable in the role, her wide-eyed innocence entwined with a thread of cunning.”

Becoming a “scream queen”

In her next roles, Taylor-Joy showcased her range, playing a prophet in the second season (2015) of the TV series Atlantis, a humanoid in the science-fiction feature Morgan (2016), and the college girlfriend of eventual U.S. president Barack Obama in the Netflix film Barry (2016). She was nonetheless soon branded as a “scream queen” thanks in part to The Witch and to roles in M. Night Shyamalan’s sequels to his 2000 thriller Unbreakable, Split (2016) and Glass (2019). In those sequels, Taylor-Joy assumed the role of Casey, a woman abducted by a man (played by James McAvoy) with dissociative identity disorder. Other nail-biters include the dark comedy Thoroughbreds (2017), the supernatural horror Marrowbone (2017), and the period thriller The Miniaturest (2017). At the end of the decade, Taylor-Joy moved away from such roles, portraying the daughter of Marie Curie (played by Rosamund Pike) in Radioactive and joining the cast of the hit series Peaky Blinders during its fifth season in 2019. She later reprised her role as a scheming wife during the series’ last (sixth) season in 2022.

Emma. and The Queen’s Gambit

In 2020 Taylor-Joy became a sensation with lead parts in the feature Emma. and the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. In the former, she assumed the role of Emma Woodhouse, a character who Jane Austen sums up in the novel of the same name as “handsome, clever, and rich.” In The Queen’s Gambit Taylor-Joy played the fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon, whose early taste of fame leads her on a self-destructive path. The show was a massive success, as a then record of 62 million households tuned in to the series within 28 days of its release and sales of chess sets surged by 125 percent in the same period. In a 2021 interview with Vanity Fair, Taylor-Joy quipped, “We used to joke on set that we were bringing sexy back to chess. We didn’t really think that’s what people would actually think.” Her performances in both projects earned her two Golden Globe nominations: one for best performance by an actress in a motion picture, musical, or comedy (Emma.) and one for best performance by an actress in a limited series, anthology series, or television motion picture (The Queen’s Gambit). She won the latter.

Other roles from the 2020s

Taylor-Joy continued to land headlining parts in the early 2020s. She took on a role as a Russian sorceress in The New Mutants (2020), an action movie based on characters from Marvel Comics’ X-Men; starred as an aspiring singer in the 1960s in Last Night in Soho (2021), a psychological thriller directed by Edgar Wright; reteamed with The Witch director Robert Eggers in The Northman (2022), a drama about a Viking avenging his father’s murder; and joined the star-studded cast of Amsterdam, a quirky comedy directed by Russell. For her role in the dark comedy The Menu (2022), Taylor-Joy was again nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture. In 2022 Taylor-Joy quietly married musician Malcolm McRae, holding a ceremony in Venice a year later.

Taylor-Joy began 2024 with a brief uncredited cameo in Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster hit Dune: Part Two as Alia Atreides, the sister of lead character Paul Atreides (Timotheé Chalamet). Both she and Villeneuve said in interviews that they hope she will appear in a potential third installment in that series. She followed that up with perhaps her most prominent role to date, Imperator Furiosa in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Some commentators viewed Taylor-Joy’s casting with trepidation, as Charlize Theron’s turn as Furiosa in the previous film was much beloved. But Taylor-Joy received mostly positive reviews of her portrayal of the taciturn character, with The New York Times singling out her deft physicality, saying that she “moves beautifully, with the kind of unforced gracefulness that suggests she can easily slip out of any difficulty.”

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