The movie that made Anya Taylor-Joy want to be an actor: “I wanted to play in that way”
Few actors have amassed as impressive a CV as Anya Taylor-Joy in the last decade. Since coming to fame for her starring role in Robert Eggers’ folk horror The Witch in 2015, the unique young star’s career has gone from strength to strength. From Split to The Menu, Emma to The Queen’s Gambit, and The Northman to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the chances are that Taylor-Joy has already made a movie or show that will inspire the next generation to pursue acting. Indeed, she has always been honest about the film that did the same for her – and, in the process, singled out one young star whose career she wanted to emulate.
Interestingly, Taylor-Joy paid tribute to the movie that made her want to be an actor for years before she came out and said those exact words. For instance, when she secretly married her musician boyfriend Malcolm McRae in 2022, she did it in a Gothic ceremony with a very specific theme.
In 2024, she posted a picture to Instagram of a dinner plate with two gruesome-looking pale shapes covered in what looked like blood, along with the caption, “Two years ago, on April Fools, I secretly married my best friend in New Orleans. The magic of that day is ingrained in every cell of my being, forever.” She added, “Yes, those are anatomically correct heart cakes. Yes, I am the vampire Lestat.”
Yes, the ceremony was vampire-themed, and the name ‘Lestat’ is a considerable clue as to the film’s identity that lit her acting fuse. In truth, though, she already mentioned it a few years earlier while speaking with British Vogue about her beauty tips for the winter.
“I am a fan of a plummy lip,” she revealed. “I have always loved that. I have got a bit of an Interview with the Vampire aesthetic, and so as soon as it gets dark outside, I love long, straight blonde hair and dark purple lips. I am like the Ghost of Christmas Past – a bit vampy – but I like it.”
For whatever reason, though, it took until 2024 for Taylor-Joy to specifically pinpoint that famous Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt gothic horror film as the one that sparked her interest in acting. “I love that movie so much,” she told Letterboxd. “I love how camp it is. I loved the book. 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.”
Indeed, it was Dunst’s performance as Claudia, a vampire cursed to live her immortality as a child, that truly spoke to Taylor-Joy. In 2017, she told The Independent that she saw Dunst in Neil Jordan’s vampiric melodrama and Jumanji, a family adventure starring Robin Williams, in fairly quick succession. The fact that a child actor could make something dark and adult alongside something aimed at children astonished her.
“I remember the first time I saw Kirsten Dunst in Jumanji,” Taylor-Joy marvelled. “I’d never seen a kid in a movie before who wasn’t much older than me. I thought, ‘Maybe I can do that. That’s interesting.’ She was also in Interview with the Vampire, and I was like, ‘You can get even darker and be in movies and still be little! That’s amazing.'”
With this in mind, Taylor-Joy’s career path starts to make a lot of sense. She was only 17 years old when she played Thomasin in The Witch, and it was a performance that belied her years, just like Dunst’s did in Interview with the Vampire. Within only a few years, though, she had moved from harrowing, frightening material like The Witch to a period romantic comedy (Emma), and a few years after that, she voiced Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros Movie. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest this ability to be a young star playing their trade in wildly different genres was modelled after Dunst in the 1990s?
