Anya Taylor Joy is THE alternative it girl. Her star has risen rapidly, but her star power seems to come from how she’s different from her contemporaries – in look, in fashion, and in her career choices. In a world where it’s easy to feel like you know almost anyone, Anya intrigues us because it feels like we don’t know her. Unlike some of her other peers who we’ve seen grow up on screen, it feels like Anya started her career suddenly, already fully formed. Anya manages to command everyone’s attention… by keeping us guessing.
TRANSCRIPT
Anya Taylor-Joy is the alternative it girl. Her star has risen rapidly, but her star power seems to come from how she’s different from her contemporaries — in look, in fashion, and in her career choices.
In a world where it’s easy to feel like you know almost anyone, Anya intrigues us because it feels like we don’t know her. Her multi-cultural background makes her hard to pin down — and she’s played a wide range of characters, adding to her sense of mystery. She began her career at the age of 16 when she was scouted as a model in London — but unlike some of her other peers who we’ve seen grow up on screen, it feels like Anya started her career suddenly, already fully formed.
This unknowability elevates her work on screen: It allows her to straddle the line between hero and villain, strong and vulnerable, glamorous and ordinary. She gets to play with identity, status, and genre across her body of work.
Here’s our take on Anya Taylor-Joy, and how she commands everyone’s attention…by keeping us guessing.
The Always Mysterious Anya
Anya is a shapeshifter, and so many of her roles carry with them a sense of transformation. This is key to her appeal — we never know what we’re going to get when she comes onto the screen. This is particularly true of her most famous role to date, as chess prodigy Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit. In the novel that the series is based on, the character is described as “the ugliest white girl ever” by her only friend, Jolene. As a successful model, Anya Taylor-Joy certainly wasn’t the most obvious choice for Beth Harmon — but she herself has commented on her unusual features, saying she thinks she’s “too weird looking” to be a Hollywood star. And while we would disagree with that statement — it is true that she’s a break from the standard blonde bombshell in Hollywood. Her large, wide-set eyes make her seem otherworldly and she’s been compared to everything from an alien to a porcelain doll.
Both the show and the novel version of The Queen’s Gambit follow Beth’s progression from a scared, nervous orphan to a confident, glamorous chess superstar. As she comes to believe in her genius, she grows in stature and confidence…and this is reflected in the reactions of people who have watched her journey. Although Anya was already starting to make a name for herself in the film world, her performance in the hit Netflix show was widely considered her breakout role, and she earned an Emmy nomination for it. It took her from a relative unknown into a member of Hollywood’s freshman class of A-listers.
In Last Night In Soho, Anya’s character is introduced as unquestionably beautiful, but it’s a particular kind of beauty. She’s a woman out of time, appearing only in flashbacks seen through the eyes of the more timid and meek Eloise. We know Eloise is obsessed by the styles and fashions of the sixties, and so Sandie comes to embody that ideal — a future star in the making who we get to watch as she’s discovered — drawing parallels to Anya in real life…before we find out her real, not-so-glamorous fate. And again, there’s a sense of mystery and transformation with the perspective flitting back and forth between Sandie and Eloise…as the connection between them reveals itself.
This theme of transformation makes it hard to pin down who Anya Taylor-Joy really is. It plays out in her fashion, too. Her red carpet looks, which range from contemporary designers to beautiful vintage pieces, always stand out, but taken together, it’s hard to define her style as any one thing. Like many other beauty icons before her, from Marlene Dietrich and Claudia Cardinale to more recent examples like Zendaya and Bella Hadid, she leans into this ambiguity and embraces her multi-national identities and experiences. And because she’s so adept at being a shapeshifter, we’re always looking for something more beneath the surface.
The Scream Queen
The Queen’s Gambit may have brought her global stardom, but Anya first took to the screen as a scream queen, playing both vulnerable protagonists and more nightmarish villains in independent and low budget horrors. As Thomasin in The Witch, all of the film’s fear is filtered through her. It’s in her younger brother’s guilty glances at her when she’s not looking and the narrative ambiguity about what exactly happened to the family’s baby in her care. We know there’s some occult presence taking shape, but we don’t know what shape it’s going to take — and neither does she. The fear we feel is her fear — fear about what’s happening to her family and what’s happening to her. The same is true in Morgan. She plays the titular character, a replicant-type science experiment who wrestles with her own sentience and again, comes to fear herself. Morgan does not understand what she is and how she should be. And much like with Beth Harmon, Anya is able to lean into her “weird-looking” features — without makeup or glamorous wardrobe, she uses her large, wide-set eyes to seem almost alien. Compared to the ordinary characters around her, she feels distinct, and it’s hard to know whether or not we can trust her.
Anya’s choices aren’t the standard genre fare — she does something new with well-established tropes. Eileen G’Sell argues that the final image of her in The Witch, floating naked in the forest with satan’s other captives, is a liberating subversion of the final girl trope, in which one female character — bruised, bloodied and traumatized — lives to tell the tale of the horror she endured. Her role as Casey in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable trilogy is similar. While in Split she is more a traditional final girl, in Glass the character returns. She is not defined by her experience of victimization — she gets to try to reclaim her story for herself.
Our beloved scream queen most recently received praise for her role in yet another Robert Eggers project. The director of The Witch put his faith in Anya once more for the action-thriller The Northman — and she did not disappoint. This time — Anya tapped into her witchy magic as the scene-stealing sorceress, Olga — where the actress suffered through some seriously intense shooting conditions to deliver a wily, yet sympathetic heroine.
In a genre defined by heroes and villains, Anya’s horror roles often show real empathy for outcasts and monsters, characters that are rarely treated complexly in the genre. In doing so, she subtly shifts our perspective, and helps push these stories forward.
High Society
While Anya’s horror movie roles let her explore a more explicit darkness — she’s also found a home playing high society, period-drama characters — which are much more subtle but still bold. She often subverts our expectations of these characters, illuminating something darker about high society living.
We’re currently living through a boom in historical fiction content that twists or reimagines the past — things like Bridgerton and the new, Fleabag-inspired Persuasion. Even musicals like Six or & Juliet play with our expectations and modernize our assumptions about the past. So on the surface, Anya’s Emma is remarkable for how down the line it feels in comparison. However, Anya’s take on the character feels far more critical than the typical aspirational heroine. While the setting still feels luxurious and opulent, and the costuming is decadent and glamorous, Emma herself is spoiled and conceited. Anya’s performance highlights how this privilege creates a sense of entitlement and self-absorption in the upper class. In Peaky Blinders, she plays a similarly affluent heiress with nefarious, manipulative character traits. The coldness she brings to the role illustrates how high society life is a double edged sword — for all the luxury, it’s incredibly unfeeling and artificial.
And this theme continues even when she takes on high society roles outside of the period piece genre. As Lily in Thoroughbreds, her character’s extreme wealth and privilege manifests itself as a kind of nihilism. While the social strata she’s in may be safe and secure, it’s also devoid of love or nurture — in fact, her friend Amanda literally can’t feel emotions. Again, her performance eschews the glamor of wealth and instead presents the sometimes cold and unfeeling nature of high society life.
These performances make Anya Taylor-Joy feel modern and incisive. Yes, her elegance makes her fit organically into these period pieces and embody these privileged characters, but the way she uses those performances to show how cruel that world can be feels like a far more modern take.
Conclusion
The more we see of someone, the less interesting they tend to become, but that doesn’t seem to have happened for Anya Taylor-Joy. And she’s not going anywhere anytime soon — she’s soon to star in a cinematic tentpole, as Furiosa in the next Mad Max film, taking on a character that’s already been iconically played by Charlize Theron.
It’s hard to pin down what she might do with that role, or indeed, any role. But that’s because even when a character seems straightforward, she looks at them in a new way… and maybe understands them in a way they haven’t been understood before.
SOURCES
Cohen, Nadia. “‘Ugly’ Fears: The Queen’s Gambit’s Anya Taylor-Joy Says ‘I’m Too Weird-Looking and Not Beautiful Enough to be a Star.’” The Sun, News Group Newspapers, 21 Nov. 2020, https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/13262331/the-queens-gambit-anya-taylor-joy-weird-looking/
G’Sell, Eileen. “A ‘Final Girl’ who Gets to Get Off: ‘The Witch’ Proves Nothing’s Scarier than an Unapologetically Liberated Young Woman.” Salon, 6 Mar. 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/03/06/a_final_girl_who_gets_to_get_off_the_witch_proves_nothings_scarier_than_an_unapologetically_liberated_young_woman/
Johnson, Nicholas. “Why The Northman’s Anya Taylor-Joy is a Joy as the Slavic Sorceress.” MovieWeb, 7 May 2022, https://movieweb.com/the-northman-anya-taylor-joy-is-a-joy/
Miller, Sarah. “The Fatal Flaw of ‘The Queen’s Gambit’.” The New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-fatal-flaw-of-the-queens-gambit
Sandberg, Bryan. “The New Hollywood A-List, From Anya Taylor-Joy to Rege-Jean Page.” The Hollywood Reporter, 11 Aug. 2021,