ELLE – It takes something—or someone—pretty formidable to overshadow Anya Taylor-Joy, one of her generation’s most talented actors and, as of this year, a newly minted Hollywood megastar. Still, as the crew gathers to begin shooting this ELLE Australia cover, everyone only has eyes for a long-haired chihuahua puppy that must weigh in at less than a kilogram. “This is Bartok the Magnificent,” declares Taylor-Joy as we sit down for our interview. The new puppy, who she picked up only two days ago, is nestled sleepily in her lap. His name is taken from the 1997 animated movie Anastasia, a historical fantasy about the murder of Russia’s imperial family in the 1920s. Bartok the Magnificent is a street-performing albino bat and sidekick of the vengeful sorcerer Rasputin. This anecdote might go some way to capturing the magic of Anya Taylor-Joy, who is fiercely talented, bitingly intelligent and face-from-the-gods beautiful, but also a little bit off-the-wall, in the way the best people always are.
“My husband and I definitely wanted to get more animals,” the 28-year-old says. (Taylor-Joy and her husband, musician Malcolm McRae, already have a cat, a ragdoll called Kitsune, who Taylor-Joy adopted while in Australia filming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga). “We were going to get a bigger dog, but our friend sent us a picture of [Bartok] and was like, ‘I just feel like this is your baby.’ We went back and forth on it a lot, because this was happening during the Furiosa press tour, and I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to cope with it. But now he’s here, and, you know what? He’s so good. And he’s really, really brave. I continue to be afraid by how tiny he is, but he runs up to all the other dogs and just wants to play. He’s dreamy, amazing.” He’s also a surprisingly adept model. And who better to lens your first fashion shoot than world-renowned photographer Pamela Hanson?
The adoption of Bartok symbolises a transition of sorts for Taylor-Joy, who has been on a seemingly endless rollercoaster ride of era-defining roles for almost a decade. It all began with The Witch, the 2015 Robert Eggers psychological horror film about an outlawed Puritan family. It was Taylor-Joy’s first role, and she announced herself as a performer with astonishing complexity as Thomasin, the family’s eldest daughter, who may or may not have made a pact with Satan. “That was the first time I read a script and got the feeling that I now recognise as, Okay, I’m going to end up doing this,” she says. “If I read a script and get that feeling, that’s it for me. I can’t sleep; I’m really anxious but I’m also super excited, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Taylor-Joy has had that feeling many times since: about Emma Woodhouse, who she played in Autumn de Wilde’s chronically underrated adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and about Margot, the lead in the gory social commentary The Menu. But most recognisably, perhaps, about Beth Harmon, the chess virtuoso who stole everyone’s hearts and catapulted Taylor-Joy to a new stratosphere of fame in The Queen’s Gambit. (Sixty-two million households watched the series in the first month of its release on Netflix in 2020.)
“I didn’t realise that these characters were real for me until I finished my first project,” says Taylor-Joy, who calls wrapping The Witch her first real heartbreak. “After that, I was working back to back and I would get on a plane when one project would wrap and say, ‘Okay, I have an hour to cry about this and process it, and then I have to give it up because I have to jump into this new skin and be available to these other people.’”
Still, it can be difficult sometimes. While filming Furiosa, Taylor-Joy was pushed to physical and emotional extremes, with stunts and months spent isolated in the desert, caked in layers of dirt and grime. Leaving that experience with the cast and crew she came to see as family was difficult. “I’m an immensely sensitive person,” she admits. “And I do just feel everything all of the time to extremes, but I think you can tell yourself that you’re lucky to be able to have those feelings. You’re lucky to have been able to love something so much that it hurts when you let it go.”
Taylor-Joy was born in Miami (a “fluke” she said, as the family happened to be holidaying there at the time), the youngest of six siblings, to an Argentine father and an Anglo Zambian mother. She lived in Buenos Aires until her family relocated to England when she was six. Taylor-Joy has been candid about how difficult she found that transition. She spoke Spanish and initially refused to learn English, hoping the family would return to Argentina. Like her most famous character, Beth, Taylor-Joy felt like a misfit until she discovered her great passion in life — for Beth it was chess, for Taylor-Joy it was acting. “I spent so much of my childhood having insane belief in the fact that there was a place where I was going to make sense and where I would have a home to put all of my energy and creativity,” she says. “And from the second I stepped on set for the first time it was like, Oh, it was true. I think that’s why Beth was fascinating to me … I was like: Fish out of water? Deep obsession with something? Slightly self-destructive tendencies? Yep, I got this.”
The success of The Queen’s Gambit put Taylor-Joy on the fashion world’s radar. A natural clothes horse (Taylor-Joy modelled before she began acting), it wasn’t long until she was announced as a brand ambassador for the house of Christian Dior, a role she has taken on with aplomb. Just look at the haute couture mermaid-detail sequin-embellished gown she wore to this year’s Oscars, inspired by the Junon and Venus gowns Dior himself designed for haute couture autumn/winter 1949, and the white chiffon gown that delicately draped over her head (also Christian Dior haute couture, styled by Ryan Hastings), which she wore to attend the Dune: Part Two world premiere in London earlier this year. “I like that with Dior, it’s always strength first, regardless of the material,” says Taylor-Joy. “I was recently at the cruise show in Scotland, and the models were walking out looking like warriors — not even warrior princesses, just warriors — I loved that.”
For Taylor-Joy, adjusting to the more glamorous aspects of her job was harder than, say, learning and performing complicated driving stunts for Furiosa. “I’m somebody who came to fashion late, I just grew up never really thinking about it,” she says. “It’s through the magic of red carpets that I have become a fashion lover. I am so interested in history, and working with Dior, where the history is so rich and you can do so much reading and research, it’s just an absolute dream.” Still, as natural as she makes glamour look, Taylor-Joy says her natural element is on set, filming. “I have always been most comfortable in blood and dirt, that is where I thrive. I thrive when I’m in my feral creature incarnation,” she says, laughing. “It’s a lot more difficult to be pristine [like today]; that requires real effort.”
We catch Taylor-Joy during a brief moment of downtime, when she and McRae — who she met in 2021 and secretly eloped with in 2022, followed by a larger ceremony in Venice in October 2023 — are settling down and setting up their lives together. She describes the experience of being married as surprisingly life-altering. “I wasn’t somebody who grew up dreaming about getting married,” she admits. “It was just never really a dream I had. In fact, I had come to a realisation within myself that my big love was going to be my art, and that any other kind of relationship would be too all-encompassing and would take me away from the thing that I love and that defines me. And what’s been beautiful about the relationship with my husband is that the heart can just continue to grow. You can continue to be somebody who loves things just as passionately, but you get to love more and more things. I think sometimes people have a fear that being married means the journey is over, rather than the journey has just begun. And that’s what I’m really, really enjoying right now. It’s like, Wow, I get to build a life with you, and you’re the person I’m doing this with. And that just feels really beautiful and profound.”
Still, one can’t help but suspect this moment of respite will be brief. Taylor-Joy’s short cameo in Dune: Part Two lays the foundations for a far larger role in the franchise’s inevitable third instalment. And she’s recently wrapped filming on The Gorge, a romantic drama starring Miles Teller and Sigourney Weaver, and the upcoming satire Sacrifice. At the Dune world premiere, she posed alongside its stars Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh and Austin Butler, a powerful image that showcased the next generation of Hollywood superstars. There has been much discourse in the past few years about how fame has now splintered into subsections of the internet, and how we don’t have film stars in the vein of Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts anymore. But the Dune world premiere instantly dispelled that idea. The Hollywood superstar is alive and well, but if you’re expecting to find her lounged out, Faye Dunaway-style, poolside at the Chateau Marmont with a blowout and stilettos, think again. You’re far more likely to find her taking Bartok the Magnificent for his daily walk, daydreaming about being back on set, or in full feral creature mode.