WSJ – From a young age, Anya Taylor-Joy knew she wanted to act. “I needed to find my community and my people, and I had this undying faith that I would end up there,” she says.
When actor Anya Taylor-Joy first read the novel The Queen’s Gambit, she immediately connected with protagonist Beth Harmon’s sense of loneliness. “Reading it, I was like, this hurts—but it hurts because I recognize it,” she says on a Zoom call from Northern Ireland, where she’s shooting her next film. “We’re taught as human beings to not really say the way we’re feeling and when you find somebody that feels the same way you do, you [think], I’m not alone in this.” Taylor-Joy, 24, finished the Walter Tevis book in an hour and a half, ahead of playing the role of Beth for Netflix’s adaptation.
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BUSTLE – In Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth doesn’t bother to pick up her own chess piece before capturing her opponent’s. She flicks her long fingers across the board, braggadociously ending each move before technically beginning it. Every stop of her chess clock, every topple of a fallen King is a tiny emotional crescendo. “One of my first thoughts was that I wanted Beth to handle the pieces in a way that, while still being aggressive, did feel uniquely feminine,” Taylor-Joy says of inhabiting the bellicose chess phenom at the center of the new limited series. Her chess coach immediately approved the choreography. “He was like, ‘Well, I’ve never seen a chess player do that, but I totally buy that she would.’”
NETFLIX QUEUE – There’s nothing like taking on the role of a world-class chess prodigy to unleash your competitive side. Just ask Anya Taylor-Joy. “I did not realize how competitive I was,” laughs the actor, who stars as Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix seven-part adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel, created by Allan Scott and writer-director Scott Frank.
“I’m competitive with myself,” she clarifies. “I’m trying to push the boundaries of what I can do.”
Taylor-Joy made her critically acclaimed debut in the 2015 horror film The Witch and more recently took the lead in Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Emma. Here, she plays chess marvel Beth from the tender age of 15, as the character tests her gift at a Kentucky orphanage in the late 1950s, all the way through to a complex 21, as Beth gains command in a male-dominated world.
