‘Almost Famous’: Anya Taylor-Joy on the movie scene that makes her “cry every time”
Since making her debut in Robert Eggers’ 2015 outing The Witch, Anya Taylor-Joy has continued on an upward trajectory that has seen her earn critical kudos in blockbusters and select niche projects. In the short period since her breakthrough, Taylor-Joy has featured in Emma, Peaky Blinders, The Queen’s Gambit, The Northman, and The Menu, solidifying her presence as one of Hollywood’s most celebrated contemporary actors.
Given her penchant for skillfully toeing the line between critical and commercial undertakings, Taylor-Joy can, in many ways, be considered a modern successor to Faye Dunaway. Thanks to the successes of this approach, it looks infallible that she will continue to be such a magnetic force in Hollywood for years to come.
The actor’s talent is evident to all viewers, with David O. Russell, the director behind her most recent outing, Amsterdam, concisely describing her talent in an email to Vanity Fair. “Anya is fearless and intuitively vulnerable and confident in a manner that is uniquely her own,” he commented. “She is different and strange in ways that are fascinating both toward darkness and toward light.”
It makes sense that an actor so revered should be a lifelong cinema devotee. Whilst she has mentioned many different movies as having defining impacts on her life and craft, one of those she holds close to her heart is Cameron Crowe’s 2000 comedy-drama, Almost Famous. A semi-autobiographical account of Crowe’s work as a teenage reporter for Rolling Stone during the early 1970s, the film tells the story of a budding journalist touring with the fictional rock band Stillwater in a bid to write his first cover story on them.
When appearing on MTV’s ‘My Life in Soundtracks‘ in 2020, Taylor-Joy revealed that her favourite musical moment in a film occurs in Almost Famous, making her “cry every time”. The scene in question is the moment Stillwater come together to sing the Elton John hit ‘Tiny Dancer’. When discussing the scene, Taylor-Joy mistakenly called the band Clearwater but went into much detail about its impact on her life.
She said: “The scene in Almost Famous where Clearwater has had a fight, because you know, on the band t-shirt, like one guy is – Russell’s like prominent on it, and everyone else is in the background – so like high drama – and they all get on the bus, and they sing ‘Tiny Dancer’ by Elton John, and they’re all friends by the end of it. That is the perfect musical moment. It just makes me cry every time.”
She added: “I was in Philadelphia earlier this year before everything went down, and I’d never been able to find like the actual soundtrack on vinyl, or on a CD or anything like that. And I went to a radio station, and they burned me a copy of the CD. So now I have my own CD of the Almost Famous soundtrack. And that was really special to me”.
