When Anya Taylor-Joy “massively embarrassed” herself in front of her favourite actor
There’s a reason the phrase ‘never meet your heroes’ has become a popular one, so often we build up movie actors and rock stars in our heads that the biting reality, the fact that they blow their noses and buy underwear and eat toast the same as all of us, can be a bit of a crushing one. But that also happens to big movie names themselves, like Anya Taylor-Joy, so maybe we shouldn’t feel bad about it.
As someone who hero worshipped Noel Gallagher for 20 years before finally meeting him and then totally embarrassing myself by not knowing what to say, I can completely relate to Taylor-Joy’s moment of horror at meeting someone she had long looked up to, but before that let’s take a look at how she has swiftly risen through the ranks to become one of the leading actors in the industry.
Her progress over a ten-year span is really quite remarkable; she was just 19 when she starred in Robert Eggers’ incredibly chilling folk horror The Witch in 2015, putting in a frankly insanely good performance given her lack of experience in a film that has gone down as one of the best low-budget horrors in recent memory.
She made the most of the deserved attention that role brought by signing on to appear in the James McAvoy comic book smash Split the following year, showing that a leading role in an M Night Shyamalan movie was in no way intimidating, the film earning some $278m at the box office on a budget of just $9m.
By now, Taylor-Joy was fiercely in demand, and after some TV work and another part in Shyamalan’s trilogy, Glass, in 2019, she appeared in the Netflix hit series The Queen’s Gambit, which fared very well, not least because everyone was stuck indoors needing something to watch thanks to a little global pandemic at the time.
Over the next few years, she cemented her superstardom with roles in Dune: Part Two, another Eggers film, the historical epic The Northman with Nicole Kidman and the brilliant Ralph Fiennes culinary black comedy The Menu, which landed her a second ‘Best Actress’ nomination at the Golden Globes.
So it’s clear that Taylor-Joy is a major talent, still yet to hit thirty and commercially and critically feted with a string of fine performances under her belt. But who provided her inspiration when she was a youngster? She told Stylist: “Saoirse Ronan was big for me when I was maybe 13 because she was the first person that I saw at the age who I thought ‘you’re a similar age to me and you’re doing to kind of films that I’m interested in – it’s not just fluffy.’”
Adding that when she finally met Ronan: “I massively embarrassed myself but she was really sweet about it, so no I think I’m OK.”
In fact, Ronan would become something of a mentor for the younger actor, despite just a two-year age gap. She is another actor who found fame and acclaim at a very early age, and has amassed four Oscar nominations, including one for Joe Wright’s period drama Atonement when she was just 13.
Taylor-Joy, meanwhile, is going to have another hit on her hands with this month’s Super Mario Galaxy movie, which is on track to be one of the highest-grossing movies this year, along with Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary. She reprises her role as Princess Peach alongside other stars like Chris Pratt, Glen Powell, Jack Black and Brie Larson.
