Anya Taylor-Joy names her four favourite movies of all time: “There’s this beautiful poetry”
It’s been a decade since Anya Taylor-Joy was first singled out as having the potential to become one of her generation’s biggest stars, and the fact she won’t turn 30 years old until April 2026 underlines how impressive her body of work has already become.
Making her feature debut in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Taylor-Joy delivered an incredible performance in her first movie, even if she still wasn’t entirely convinced her future lay in acting. She definitely made the right call, though, effortlessly weaving between genres and constantly adding new strings to her bow.
Whether it was the razor-sharp black comedy Thoroughbreds, M Night Shyamalan’s Glass, the Jane Austen adaptation Emma, the deliciously dark The Menu, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, a reunion with Eggers on The Northman, or her Golden Globe-winning turn in the Netflix limited series The Queen’s Gambit; Taylor-Joy hasn’t met a challenge she couldn’t meet.
George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga even displayed her action hero chops, although the film itself was a box office bust. The sky is the limit for Taylor-Joy, and while she’s willing to dive into any type of production, the quartet of films she named as her all-time favourites to Letterboxd spoke more to how they shaped her growing up than what she’s seeking to emulate in her own career.
“There’s something about the films you watch as a kid that just have such an impact on you,” she explained when naming Steven Spielberg’s Hook as her first pick. “I remember on my first school trip, we each got to take a VHS, and I took Hook. Hook lives up there for me. I love that movie so, so much.” Spielberg might hate it, but Taylor-Joy is one of the many who most definitely don’t.
Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous mesmerised the actor “just in terms of being able to create a tone.” Inspired by the writer and director’s own experiences as a journalist following rock bands around the country, Taylor-Joy “can see that movie in colour and in a feeling,” with the coming-of-age dramedy connecting to her on a deeper level than simply being a great movie.
Book-to-movie translations can often infuriate fans of the source material, but that wasn’t the case for Taylor-Joy and Interview with the Vampire. “I love that movie so much. I love how camp it is. I loved the book,” she said. “I really love just anything gothic, and I think seeing those two guys have so much fun in those roles, and Kirsten Dunst as a kid, just kind of made me want to get into acting. I wanted to play in that way.”
Robert Zemeckis’ Oscar-botherer Forrest Gump is one of those films many have turned against with time, but not Taylor-Joy: “I love that movie. I miss movies like that, just huge epic sagas where you feel every emotion under the sun, and there’s this beautiful poetry underneath it. I love it.”
Clearly, she’s got a soft spot for 1990s films, with Almost Famous the only outlier. Then again, it may have been released in September 2000, but it was shot between May and October 1999, so no other decades need apply if they want to make Taylor-Joy’s list.
