Why Anya Taylor-Joy owes her career to The Beach Boys: “Just go for it”
From an early age, those around Anya Taylor-Joy recognised that she had more to offer than most.
From her side, finding where she belonged was never exactly easy. As a kid, she always felt a bit too much or not quite enough to properly fit in, and school didn’t help – no one seemed to understand her, which just left her feeling left out and a bit lost. She’d moved from Buenos Aires to London when she was six, and that shift alone was jarring – like being dropped into a world that didn’t quite make sense yet.
But immersing herself in the arts – ballet, specifically – opened doors that eventually led to her discovery and official pathway to acting. Most people paying attention remember first coming across Taylor-Joy in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, a considerably bold venture for her first-ever feature debut. Not playing it safe at all, Taylor-Joy brought innocence and nuance to the character Thomasin, pouring just the right amount of delicacy into a character who slowly slips more and more into the evil grip of witchcraft and temptation.
Since then, Taylor-Joy has played many memorable roles, including the complicated heroine Margot in Mark Mylod’s The Menu. But along the way, there’s always been a constant thread of inspiration, whether it’s in Taylor-Joy’s search for belonging or the techniques she nurtures to bring her characters to life on screen. When she first moved to England, she didn’t want to learn English at all, feeling it wasn’t even her home.
Slowly, however, she started to let other things in – stories that she connected with, other pieces of the arts that made her feel closer to something more worthwhile. She learned English by watching School of Rock, Harry Potter, and Jumanji.
She’s a big music fan, not only having married someone from the scene, but in terms of how it shapes her attitude both as an actor and someone navigating the harsh perils of life: “Soundtracks are amazing, they make your whole life a movie,” she once said.
She also recalled some of her favourite scores, one being the famed ‘Tiny Dancer’ scene in Almost Famous, which she said “always makes her cry” because of the poignancy of found family. However, Taylor-Joy’s deep love for music ventures back further to one specific moment that she and those around her realised she had something others didn’t – courage and knowledge.
At 15 years old, pouring her heart out at The Beach Boys’ 50th Reunion, Taylor-Joy was called up on stage because she outshone even the most loyal of Beach Boys veterans. “I grew up listening to the music of the ’50s and the ’60s – that was just like my literal jam – and they were playing, and I just ran to the very front and was singing my heart out,” she said.
She went on, “And Mike Lovestopped the concert and said, ‘I understand why all of you know all the words to the songs, but there’s a literal child that is singing every single song. I’d like to invite her up on stage.’ He handed me a guitar, and I said, ‘I don’t know how to play the guitar.’ He was like, ‘No, no. Just go for it,’ so I air-guitared like crazy.”
A lot of Taylor-Joy’s life played out like that after that. A handful of years later, she’d have her breakthrough, and even though she’d experienced living on the sidelines since six years old, all it took was leaning into the strengths that set her apart in the first place. It was never about fitting in for Taylor-Joy, but realising that standing out because of your differences was what ultimately got you noticed.
