The 2019 movie Anya Taylor-Joy was banned from appearing in: “There’s no role for you”
Sometimes, an actor is lucky enough to find a director who wants to work with them more than once, finding a close sense of kinship, of creative understanding, within them. It’s a beautiful thing to find someone who understands you artistically, because bringing a cinematic vision to life is never going to be easy.
For Anya Taylor-Joy, her first film role solidified her friendship with a filmmaker whom she has since collaborated with again, and, in a way, they owe a lot to each other. You see, not only did Taylor-Joy receive her breakthrough into the industry with her role in The Witch, but director Robert Eggers might not have found such significant success with the movie if not for the actor’s starring role.
Don’t get me wrong, his screenplay and direction are terrific, but there’s something so captivating about Taylor-Joy as Thomasin which elevates the movie to extraordinary heights.
She is cunning, playful, at times fearful and confused. Playing a young girl accused of witchcraft by her family, she goes through the motions as she navigates these strange waters, eventually giving in to these supernatural forces and joining a coven of naked witches. She was only 18, but her performance contained the nuance of someone much more experienced, so it’s no surprise that Eggers was keen to work with the budding star again.
He next cast her in 2022’s The Northman as a sorceress named Olga of the Birch Forest, although she missed out on landing a role in his second movie, The Lighthouse, a few years earlier… The 2019 film was a huge success, with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe starring as lighthouse keepers stranded by a storm, and as soon as Taylor-Joy heard about Eggers’ plans for the film, she begged him to be in it.
The actor was desperate to collaborate with Eggers again, but he had to break it to her that there was no part she would be able to take on… With its small cast, there were very few women in the film besides a mermaid. Taylor-Joy revealed to NME, “I was jumping at it because when he first called me and was like, ‘Hey, I’m making The Lighthouse, and there’s no role for you. There’s a mermaid…”
She would’ve taken any part just to work with Eggers again, but he wouldn’t let her. “I was like, ‘I can be the mermaid!’ He was like, ‘You really should not be this particular mermaid, Anya.’ I was like, ‘I can be the seagull, I can just be in the background.’”
So, Eggers essentially banned the actor from appearing in the film, even though she certainly would’ve made a great mermaid. The character played a pretty important role in the movie, albeit a rather graphic one, but Taylor-Joy has never been one to shy away from a more provocative and daring part.
Yet, it seems like it just wasn’t meant to be. You can’t always get what you want, even if Taylor-Joy did deliver a show-stopping performance in Eggers’ first movie, The Witch.
