The crucial decision that changed Anya Taylor-Joy’s career
In 2015, Anya Taylor-Joy landed the starring role in Robert Eggers’ feature debut, The Witch. The part was the actor’s feature film debut, kickstarting her career as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after stars. However, as a child, Taylor-Joy found herself unsure of her place. Born in Florida, only to relocate to Buenos Aires and then London, the actor felt like an outcast, using her skills as an outlet.
Reflecting on a challenging time of her life, she once explained to the Evening Standard: “I didn’t really feel like I fit in anywhere. I was too English to be Argentine, too Argentine to be English, too American to be anything. The kids just didn’t understand me in any shape or form. I used to get locked in lockers.”
Taylor-Joy eventually settled into life in London, where she was signed to an acting agent after she was noticed by Downtown Abbey’s Allen Leech while practising for a screentest during a modelling shoot. Taylor-Joy told Marie Claire, “I’m still so amazed he did that as he had no reason to do it and there was no benefit in him [doing so]. My agent, Cat, and I are super close and she told me, ‘he really pushed it, he kept asking me have you called her yet? Have you called her? You need to call this girl!'”
Subsequently, Taylor-Joy landed her first movie role in the form of the folk horror movie The Witch, a $4million production which ended up raking in $40m, becoming one of A24’s highest-grossing movies. The actor played Thomasin, the daughter of a Puritan family who relocate to a farm in New England during the 1630s. Soon after they arrive, supernatural events begin taking place, with Thomasin finding herself accused of witchcraft.
Taylor-Joy gave an incredible performance that cemented her as an extraordinary talent, demonstrating astonishing range as she moved between humourous deliveries and genuinely unnerving moments of anguish and fear. After The Witch, Taylor-Joy starred in a series of horror and thriller movies such as Split and Thoroughbreds before landing larger roles like the eponymous protagonist in Emma and the ’60s singer Sandie in Last Night in Soho.
However, Taylor-Joy’s career almost went in a completely different direction when she was offered a Disney role on the same day she landed The Witch. She told Harper’s Bazaar: “I remember it was the same day I got asked to be in a Disney Channel pilot, and it was so exciting to be offered anything at all that I ran around the house like a loon.”
She explained: “But I just had this really good feeling about The Witch that made me willing to forego the Disney experience for the thing that felt unknown to me, the thing that felt sacred.”
Luckily, her instinct was correct, stating that her experience working on The Witch “gave me the cornerstones of the way I work now … which is essentially the idea that there is no hierarchy on set: you work hard, you stay on top of the shots and you don’t assume anyone else is going to do that for you.”
