Anya Taylor-Joy: the rising star forged by fear and self-doubt
Confidence is one of the most important qualities an actor needs to make it to the top of the industry, although it’s something Anya Taylor-Joy has often found in short supply. She’s contemplated quitting altogether more than once, but those self-doubts became the making of her as a star.
Taylor-Joy only had a couple of minor television roles under her belt before she made her big screen bow under the direction of another first-time in Robert Eggers’ The Witch. The slow-burning folk horror burrowed under the skin and refused to leave, with the actor on towering form in a performance it was impossible to tell was the first she’d ever given in a movie.
The result was a sleeper hit that recouped its modest production back ten times over at the box office, earning stellar notices from critics and audiences alike. Retrospectively, it’s easy to call The Witch one of the best horror flicks of the 2010s and a star-maker, but Taylor-Joy didn’t see it that way.
When she first saw the film, she admitted she was “devasted” by the work she’d put in and was convinced The Witch would be the beginning and end of her theatrical exploits. The opposite has obviously proven true, but it ended up emerging as a recurring theme that Taylor-Joy’s most vocal critic would be herself.
She followed The Witch with a number of tonally and thematically disparate features like M Night Shyalaman’s psychological thriller Split, the jet-black comedy Thoroughbreds, and biographical drama Radioactive before taking on her biggest challenge yet by headlining a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma.
Taylor-Joy was further outside her comfort zone than she’d ever been, and she knew it. It was another commercial success that earned three Academy Award nominations and got her on the Golden Globes shortlist for ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’, but once again, she was prepared to abandon ship.
“That really panicked me because it was a role that was supposed to be beautiful from the offset, and I hadn’t done that. I’d played creatures, outsiders, whatever,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “For some reason, I guess that triggered some childhood trauma, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it’. There’s no way, I’m going to really let people down.’”
She was so trepidatious over playing a Golden Globe-nominated part that she found herself “at an emotional space where I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can do this'” and continued acting. A rest, recharge, and reset were required, which coincidentally led to the most fruitful period of her short career once Taylor-Joy began to accept that she was actually pretty good at this whole acting thing.
A hypnotic turn in Edgar Wright’s frustratingly meandering Last Night in Soho, a ferociously committed outing in Eggers’ historical epic The Northman, a delectably dark display in Mark Mylod’s The Menu, second billing behind Chris Pratt in billion-dollar behemoth The Super Mario Bros Movie, and a small-but-pivotal part in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two have only served to strengthen her position.
That’s without even mentioning her memorable contributions to Peaky Blinders as the overconfident Gina Gray, or The Queen’s Gambit winning her a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film’. After taking that year off and realising what everybody else knew, Taylor-Joy has embraced her rapid – and nigh-on unstoppable – ascent up the Hollywood ladder.
Stepping into Charlize Theron’s shoes to headline George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga wasn’t an easy decision to make, either, but Taylor-Joy went all-in on the daunting challenge. Sure, the movie may have undeservedly bombed in cinemas, but that doesn’t make her performance any less dedicated or impressive.
Encapsulating her newfound approach, Taylor-Joy once confessed the hardest lesson she’s ever learned is “that negative self-talk and negative self-image have a real impact on how you live your life.” She found it “important to spend time analysing the way you speak to yourself and why,” and she hasn’t looked back since seizing that bull by the horns.
