MARIE CLAIRE – Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t consider herself to be a particularly competitive person…at least, not with other people. “I can be very, very hard on myself,” she says from a sun-drenched hotel room in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she’s been camped out since August filming Robert Eggers’ The Northman. She pauses to note the “miraculous” amount of light pouring in through the window, laughs, apologizes for interrupting herself, and then returns to her point: that she is perhaps her own greatest adversary.

 

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DUJOUR – The American-born, English Argentine actress, Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and this year’s adaptation of Emma (she also had a recurring role on Peaky Blinders), is back in the spotlight with a new project: Netflix’s new original series The Queen’s Gambit.

Based on the 1983 book of the same name by Walter Tevis, the miniseries follows Beth Harmon, a young orphan in 1950s Kentucky, who is taught chess by the custodian at the orphanage. After the young girl’s gift is discovered and nurtured, a series of setbacks occurs until she’s adopted by a family which enables her to develop this gift and reach her full potential in the game. The series takes us from Kentucky to Paris, New York and Moscow following the talented young woman in her journey to become the best chess player in the world.

The 24-year-old actress talked to DuJour about why this role excited her and how 2020 has changed her.

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Anya Taylor-Joy is featured in the September digital version of Interview Magazine, photographed by Till Janz. George MacKay, her co-star in The Marrowbones interviewed her for the occasion.

INTERVIEW – Early in her career, Anya Taylor-Joy was quick to get labeled a “scream queen,” the cliché used to describe a female actor whose profession is peril. And while it’s true that the 24-year-old performer’s 2015 debut, The Witch, was a bloodcurdling nightmare—ditto for her follow-ups Morgan and Split—Taylor-Joy, with her ferocious intensity and spell-binding vulnerability, has elevated herself above the trappings of any single genre. This year alone, Taylor-Joy has appeared as the title character in Autumn de Wilde’s modernized adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, will play a Russian mystic in the comic-book-inspired The New Mutants, and was set to make her return to horror in Edgar Wright’s pandemic-delayed Last Night in Soho. Next month, she’ll carry The Queen’s Gambit, a seven-episode miniseries based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel about Beth Harmon, an orphan who rises to become a chess grandmaster while struggling with addiction. Just before she was set to film her next role in the Viking saga The Northman (a reunion with The Witch director Robert Eggers), Taylor-Joy connected with her friend, the actor George MacKay, to discuss, among other things, growing up, playing chess, and battling demons.

 

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Like the characters in The New Mutants, a new superhero film in which they star, Anya Taylor-Joy and Maisie Williams who head their line-up have little to do, at least initially, except for some aspects: they are both considered it girls by coined. Recently, they have legions of followers who leave their mark on social networks and they are both aware that “entering a film franchise like this, within the Marvel universe, gives you a great exposure that is always beneficial and that, unlike the series, it is not an annual obligation, but there can be interruptions of two or three years between films, so it is not so regulated, “according to Williams. “And also, says Taylor – Joy, for me, who has worked a lot in independent films where the most important thing is the character, this is a completely atypical superhero movie. I’ve seen some in which the characters don’t tell me anything. The action is incredible and everything is spectacular, but I don’t get to know who those guys really are. That is why I was afraid to make a film of this type. But, in addition to being the superhero genre’s first foray into the realm of horror, the characters are so well drawn that they seem straight out of real life. They have all had a dark past and are far from perfect. So why not focus on those blemishes since that’s what makes them interesting?”

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