ELLE UK – Anya Taylor-Joy is a woman who lives in extremes. ‘I pulled together my 30th birthday party in two days,’ she says. ‘Two hundred of my favourite people in one place, on a Wednesday, in LA. My friends DJed some pretty intense techno, which I realised is not everyone’s cup of tea, but they got into it.’ She partied until 1.30pm the next day, then slept for two hours and went to Coachella – before coming back, packing a bag and driving across America.

She rides through every situation like this, with the same hard-core intensity she brings to the screen, squeezing the utmost out of every frame. In person, however, she is anything but frantic. It’s a sweltering 35°C and London has that specific unhinged energy only a heatwave can bring. At midday, people with pints are already noisily congregating on the pavements. But three floors above, in an air-conditioned Soho House, it’s a different picture: Taylor-Joy enters, a portrait of serenity in an ivory midi-dress from Fforme, its pleated satin illuminating her pale skin. There’s a meticulousness to the way she sits, speaks and moves that makes even the smallest gesture feel intentional. She picks up my recording device and examines it in her palm, as though trying to calculate its weight. She orders a drink – ‘a Diet Coke would be amazing’ – pondering at length whether it’s actually any different to Coke Zero.

Caffeine calls: in London for 48 hours to promote her new TV series Lucky, she’s come directly from the set of This Morning. Last weekend, she was in New York to attend Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden. ‘It was wonderful,’ she says, consciously adding nothing more. The last time she spent a significant period in the English capital was over Christmas, when she was based at her house in east – an area she chose because of its ‘village feel’, almost cut off from the rest of the city. ‘You feel a little like Jane Austen [when you go into the centre of London]. Like, “I’m going to town”,’ she says, mimicking a posh English accent not dissimilar to the one she used to play the protagonist in the 2020 film Emma.

Regency-era ladies are just one of the many guises Taylor-Joy has taken on during her acting career. She made her debut in Robert Eggers’s 2015 indie horror The Witch, before landing a breakout role as the red-haired chess prodigy in Netflix’s lockdown hit series The Queen’s Gambit, which won her a Golden Globe. From there, things accelerated at vertiginous speed. In 2022, she played a Slavic sorceress in The Northman and a sex worker under threat in The Menu. In 2024, she was the post-apocalyptic warrior Furiosa in the Mad Max Saga of the same name – and made a surprise cameo in Dune: Part Two. At the end of the year, she’ll return as Alia Atreides in the third iteration of Dune, alongside Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet. ‘Denis [Villeneuve] is one of my favourite film-makers of all time,’ she says. This summer, she officially joined the cast of The Lord of The Rings: The Hunt for Gollum (‘I feel like I’ve been an elf my whole life, so it feels very validating,’ she told Rotten Tomatoes); she’s also rumoured to be playing a young Joni Mitchell in an upcoming biopic, alongside Meryl Streep (about which her lips remain sealed).

But first, she’s starring as the eponymous lead of the pulse-racing new Apple TV series Lucky. A big-budget, seven-episode thriller, it follows Taylor-Joy as she runs, quite literally, from the time-capsule playground of Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace to the calming waters of Big Sur, California, after a 10-million-dollar heist goes wrong. The project came about when, two years ago, Reese Witherspoon sent her a copy of Marissa Stepley’s book of the same name and asked if she’d like to be involved. Taylor-Joy said she would love to co-produce. ‘I’ve always been interested in not just why something works, but how it works,’ she says of her own production company Lady Killer, which she set up in 2024. ‘I felt like I’d been doing it for a while. It just hadn’t been part of my job title.’

If Lucky’s chase scenes played to Taylor-Joy’s natural speed, her foray into producing allowed her to flex ‘the spreadsheet side’ of her personality. ‘I learnt that being a leader is about being unflappable,’ she says. ‘It’s not your job to freak out, it’s your job to find solutions and soothe everybody else.’ She cast her good friend and stunt double from Furiosa, Hayley Wright, and Annette Bening as the scheming mob leader. She also brought in Timothy Olyphant to play Lucky’s charming yet manipulative father, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as the series’ ruthless, worn-out FBI agent.

It was while watching Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 romantic drama Queer that she knew blue-eyed Drew Starkey was the only man to play Lucky’s love interest: ‘I was like, “That guy, we need him!”’ she says. ‘We got along so well.’ Starkey learned a great deal from his co-star. ‘As an actor, Anya is unbelievably giving,’ he says. ‘She has a great capacity to share herself in a way that’s vulnerable and compelling. As a producer, she’s the ultimate collaborator. She was open to the creative team and crew in ways that gave a voice to every member working on the story, while still having the strength to stand firm in her own ideas. You simply trust her.’

Lucky herself is scheming and manipulative, but she’s not a traditional con-artist. Her motivations are deeply psychological and calculated. ‘Anya is a wonderful actor, but beyond that she’s incredibly smart – she radiates this effortless intelligence that is vital to the character,’ says Jonathan Tropper, creator and co-showrunner. ‘Lucky is complicated. Fearless and frightened, broken but hopeful, and it’s all wrapped up in this innate intelligence. When you watch Anya in the role, whether she’s on her front or back foot, you never doubt that Lucky is the smartest person in the room.’

That intelligence may be what makes Taylor-Joy a natural fit for the role, alongside her deep understanding of family ties. But while Taylor-Joy’s character operates under the looming influence of her father, in real life, her parents’ impact is more gentle. She credits her father, a former banker of Argentine-Scottish descent, and mother, a psychologist, with helping her get to where she is while keeping her grounded. ‘My dad’s motto from when I was very little was: the harder I work, the luckier I’ll get,’ she says. ‘My mum always told me to be myself. That’s taken a long time to learn, and I think it’s something you just have to keep reminding yourself of.’ When I ask how she checks herself, she says: ‘I try to focus more on the things that I love rather than trying to self-analyse all the time.’

Those passions include dance. She trained in ballet, but gave up pointe for raving at 15; she needed something less controlled. ‘That’s a pretty good split of my personality, to be honest,’ she says. ‘Ballet class and deep, dark techno.’ Spirituality is another outlet – she meditates, gifts her friends decks of tarot cards and called her 30th birthday party ‘Spectral Spring’ (‘I wanted it to look a bit culty. Everyone was in long white dresses or suits and flower crowns’). She’s an incessant reader, and travels with around 20 physical books at any given time. ‘I’ve just finished Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and I’m about to start reading Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living,’ she says. ‘Deborah and Olivia Laing are up there’ with her favourite writers, and she’s developing Bella Mackie’s book How to Kill Your Family into a Netflix series, with filming starting ‘soon’.

Throughout it all, she retains a childlike obsession with animals and the natural world, whether it’s doting on her ‘massive, fluffy’ cat Emperor Kitsune, or falling asleep to David Attenborough’s Asia documentary. She engages in what she describes as ‘an active slowing down’ by visiting national parks.

Taylor-Joy’s innate curiosity appears to stem rom her cross-cultural upbringing. Born in Miami, she grew up as the youngest of six siblings – four of whom are from her father’s previous marriage – in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ‘When I think about myself as a child, I just imagine being in the woods and looking up at the sky,’ she says. ‘I’d play by myself there for hours. I was very concerned with the patterns of migratory birds, so I’d get all the kids at school to build nests. I thought that was our responsibility.’

No birds came, and when her family moved to London when she was six, things – beyond the sky – were greyer. At first, she refused to learn English, preferring to speak with her native Spanish, and was severely bullied in school. By the time she was a teenager, she had developed a love of acting, and she convinced her parents to let her travel to New York alone to take part in a directing programme at 14. Things turned a corner two years later when she was scouted by Sarah Doukas, who famously discovered Kate Moss, while Taylor-Joy was walking her dog outside Harrods in Knightsbridge. Fashion itself held little appeal: she only accepted because she believed modelling might open the door to acting. And sure enough, a conversation on a fashion shoot with actor Allen Leech, who played Brandon in Downton Abbey, led to her signing with his agent.

‘It wasn’t that I didn’t like clothes,’ she says, of those early modelling days. ‘But I used to have a friend who would try to get me to watch fashion shows, and I was like, “What are we doing? We could be outside.”’ Things are different now. ‘The transformational power of fashion really got me hooked,’ she says. ‘The more I learnt about craftsmanship, the more fun I found it.’ She describes her personal style as slinky and comfortable: ‘If I could live in Galliano silk for the entirety of my life, I’d be very happy!’ In 2021, she was announced as a global brand ambassador for Dior. Earlier this year, she attended the house’s 2027 cruise show with her musician husband Malcolm McRae, from the band More*.

Taylor-Joy becomes visibly giddy when she mentions McRae. She is, naturally, a romantic. When the couple first met at a music studio, they discovered they shared the same birthday, April 16, and after they made their first public appearance – photographed kissing on the streets of New York in May 2021 – they eloped to New Orleans in April of the following year. ‘I don’t want to sound smug, but I love him so much,’ she says. ‘To have a best friend who goes through life with you – it has given me a sense of security that I didn’t really ever dream about. It wasn’t something that was on my list. Now that I have it, I just feel emboldened to take more risks because I know I’ve got something really nutritive and solid and healthy and so f*cking fun. I laugh, like, 90 percent of the time.’

When they’re not together, which is a lot, they check in to catch up on their ‘adventures’ at the beginning and end of every day. ‘Malc’s got a dumb phone. And I’ve kind of been offline for a while,’ she says. In an early interview, she said she stopped looking in mirrors for a long time after seeing cruel comments about her looks on social media. Being offline has ‘done wonders’ for her mental health: ‘I do sometimes feel like I don’t really know what’s going on [online], but I think it’s so nice to be fully present.’

She’s looking ahead to the next decade: if her twenties were about adventure at full tilt, her thirties promise much of the same. ‘There’s a fire that starts up in me when I realise something is going to be tough,’ she says. ‘I love to be in situations where others would be miserable and make them places full of joy. Like Dune, shooting in the desert. Yes, it’s hot. Who cares? This is wild!’ Taylor-Joy will always favour the margins over the middle ground: hot or cold, hard or soft, techno or ballet. ‘When I was a kid, I told my mum, “the middle is death”,’ she says now, laughing. ‘I think she was trying to talk to me about balance.’ Growing up hasn’t softened her appetite for life in the fast lane. ‘Having been in some really dark places, I now have such an appreciation for it all. What a privilege it is to be exhausted by the thing that you love!’