Anya Taylor-Joy

With her fluid cross-Atlantic voice, cutting intelligence, and large eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy (birthname: Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy) is an actor who seems to own the screen and catch the viewer’s attention effortlessly.

Her career has been superbly managed, with her ability to collaborate with strong, top-flight filmmakers (Robert Eggers, George Miller, Autumn de Wilde, Scott Frank, David O. Russell, M. Night Shyamalan, and Edgar Wright) matched by a gallery of intensely memorable performances, from her startling debut in Eggers’s first feature, Witches (2015) to her widely heralded lead roles in de Wilde’s Emma and Frank’s limited series, The Queen’s Gambit (2020).

Anya Taylor-Joy’s performances stand apart from most of her peers because she cleverly layers her roles with seemingly contradictory moods: Her characters appear to be crafty and always thinking a few moves ahead of her opposition, yet simultaneously exude a moving vulnerability. The best actors convey drama and conflict from the inside out, and no one in her age group does this better than Taylor Joy. 

Shyamalan cast her in the second, and then third entries in his Unbreakable trilogy–Split (2016), opposite James McEvoy, and Glass (2019), with McAvoy and Samuel L. Jackson, while in between these projects delivered striking performances in the 2017 indie movies Thoroughbreds and Marrowbone. But in 2020, the pair of Emma and The Queen’s Gambit, catapulted Anya Taylor-Joy to the upper echelon of young actors. She followed these with a bravura performance in Wright’s Last Night in Soho. 

Anya Taylor-Joy was cast by filmmaker Robert Egger for his historical drama, The Northman (2022), starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Björk, and Willem Dafoe, released in the US by Focus Features and in the rest of the world by Universal Pictures to a global gross of $70 million, matching costs.

Taylor-Joy co-starred in the Mark Mylod-directed black comedy, The Menu, (2022), with Ralph Fiennes, John Leguizamo, Nicholas Hoult, Hong Chau, Janet McTier, and Judith Light, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before a successful Searchlight Pictures release with $80 million global box office returns and a Golden Globe best actress nomination for Taylor-Joy.

Taylor-Joy joined director/writer/producer David O. Russell for the loopy mystery-comedy, Amsterdam (2022), co-starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Taylor Swift, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, and Rami Malek, but was a commercial failure for 20^th Century Studios and Regency Enterprises with a $31 million gross against $80 million costs.

Taylor-Joy took on a voice role as Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), co-directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and co-starring Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, and Fred Armisen, and grossing a fantastic $1.36 billion in global box office (with $100 million expenses) for Universal Pictures.

Anya Taylor-Joy starred in filmmaker George Miller’s highly anticipated Mad Max spinoff epic, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), co-starring Chris Hemsworth and Tom Burke, and premiering at the Cannes film festival before a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Taylor-Joy then co-starred in and produced the action-adventure, Sacrifice (date to be announced), directed, produced, and co-written by Romain Gavras and co-starring Chris Evans, Brendan Fraser, and Salma Hayek. Taylor-Joy then reunited with her The Queen’s Gambit director-writer, Scott Frank, for a feature adaptation and US/German co-production of Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark (date to be announced).