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.’”

 

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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.

 

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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 posing for the newest edition of The Fall Magazine, wearing Miu Miu pieces. Enjoy!