The filmmaker Anya Taylor-Joy called her creative soulmate: “I love that man to death”
When actors start their careers as young as Anya Taylor-Joy did, it’s easy to quickly figure out who you’d work with again and who you’d avoid in the future.
That said, Taylor-Joy’s journey was fairly unique, considering that she moved to England from Argentina at an early age and experienced a different form of societal displacement, struggling to fit in at school because “the kids just didn’t understand me in any shape or form”. In most circles, Taylor-Joy was the odd one out, the outsider who was bullied for being different.
As history tells us, standing out in this way often breeds the best and most talented kinds of creatives. As unfortunate and “traumatic” as the experience was, Taylor-Joy’s otherworldly features and personality worked in her favour when she ultimately entered the film world, earning her breakthrough in Robert Eggers’ quirky debut, The Witch.
Anyone who’s seen the film will know just how perfect a role this was for a Taylor-Joy at this particular juncture, and how perfect Eggers was as a director in shaping her into the versatile actor that we now know. Set in 1630s New England, The Witch follows a Puritan family who are haunted by a demonic presence and suspect their oldest daughter (Taylor-Joy) of being a witch.
Aside from the obvious themes of religious paranoia and satanic panic, the film also navigates complex feminist throughlines in a really unique way, using the character Black Phillip as a symbol that represents the move from Puritanism to something more untoward, something that tempts Thomasin (Taylor-Joy) towards “living deliciously” and on her own terms.
A vision like this was ideal for Taylor-Joy’s first breakthrough role, sparking the realisation that Eggers was the director that she’d return to at any given opportunity. In fact, Taylor-Joy worked with Eggers once more on 2022’s The Northman, and was also connected with Nosferatu before Lily Rose-Depp was announced as the lead role.
Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that the actor will pair with him for another project, likely in the near future. Discussing their relationship with Parade, the actor went so far as to describe him as her “creative soulmate”. She also recalled a scenario that proved her familiarity with his way of working, when other actors on set, who hadn’t worked with him before, thought it was going to be “fun and cushy”.
“I was like, ‘No, no, no: where the script says there are icebergs, they’re not fake icebergs. He will find a place with icebergs, and you will be getting into that water. That’s the way this goes,’” she said.
She also explained that she “thrives on experiences like that” and that their partnership works so well because they understand each other so well. She also mentioned that this is the case because they grew up in the industry together, and that the success of The Witch – being Taylor-Joy’s breakthrough and Eggers’ debut – means they’ll always be bound by creative kinship. As she put it, “Of all directors, I think Robert’s the one who really has a grasp on my soul.”
