VOGUE – This time two years ago, Anya Taylor-Joy was knee-deep in the rust-red earth of Broken Hill making the epic Furiosa. During the five months of production, Taylor-Joy fell in love with Australia and in particular Sydney, seeking out secret harbourside beaches, seeing movies at the Randwick Ritz, walking most Sundays from her rental in Paddington all the way to Newtown. Taylor-Joy has barely been back in the city for 24 hours and already she’s visited SWOP, the thrift store in Darlinghurst, and bought an oversized T-shirt emblazoned with Remy, the cartoon character from Ratatouille.

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GQ – Naturally, the setting is supernatural. Rain is streaking from a sky cloaked in darkness, our meeting point a bronze statue of Diana the Huntress firing an arrow. Of course, she really does seem to come out of thin air, dressed in all black and flanked by sheets of white-blonde hair that in the grey light have the glow of a planetary eclipse. And, needless to say, she has no umbrella, no hat, no raincoat – not even a protective cloud-for-one drifting above her – but still seems both weirdly dry and glacially unperturbed.

Anya Taylor-Joy – whose career of playing satanic witches and demigods from dusty planets has apparently armed her against the elements – touches down on earth in the spectral gloom of Hyde Park’s rose garden. It is a miserable March afternoon. Even the ducks are exhibiting symptoms of late-onset seasonal affective disorder. We leave in search of shelter, my umbrella contorting inside out. Emerging through the mist are two bedraggled children, clinging onto their ponies in a scene spun from the bizarre hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. Taylor-Joy had originally wanted us to go horse riding today, something she learned to do as a child living in Buenos Aires, even before she could walk. She spots the children, who look even more miserable than the ducks, and says wistfully, “That could be us.”

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ELLE US – For a long time, Anya Taylor-Joy kept a secret. Aside from her mother, very few people in her life knew the truth. Anything to keep the tabloids from finding out. The fact that she and a certain new man in her life were able to keep the story as quiet as they did—for as long as they did—was, she says today, “unbelievable.”

To be clear, the secret she’s referring to was her shock appearance in Dune: Part Two, a minute-long fever dream that made international news and reportedly set up a major role in the next film. News of her cameo—unknown perhaps even to her costar Zendaya—broke just before the London premiere earlier this year. “I think Z had suspicions whilst filming,” Taylor-Joy says, adding, “I really wanted them to know. I didn’t just want to show up and be like, ‘Hi.’”

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NEW YORK TIMES – There’s nothing normal about making a “Mad Max” movie, and Anya Taylor-Joy knew that when she signed on to star in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the newest film in George Miller’s long-running action series.

“I wanted to be changed,” she said. “I wanted to be put in a situation in extremis where I would have no choice but to grow. And I got it.”

Trials by fire don’t burn much hotter than the conflagration that consumed “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), the most recent film in the franchise, which was one of the most infamously difficult productions in Hollywood history. In the works for nearly two decades, the movie was shut down several times by studio executives, who feared they were producing a big-budget boondoggle. And the constant clashes between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, two of its stars, in the remote Namibian desert required outside intervention.

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