Anya Taylor-Joy’s Dark Material

BRITISH 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.”

Anya Taylor-Joy thrives in this kind of situation. Or, verbatim: “I feckin’ love this shit.” When she was 18 and on the set of her first film, Robert Eggers’ 2015 pilgrim horror The Witch, she enjoyed helping to drag camera gear out of the mud and wrangle one of her troublesome scene partners (a badly behaved goat named Charlie). Making that film with such a small budget taught her how good it felt to be useful, something she still holds onto now. Taylor-Joy never complains. Actually, that’s not true. She did complain once making Eggers’ Gladiator-with-vikings epic The Northman, but she was in freezing mud up to her knees, and she’d been in a field for an hour, and so could they please start rolling? At which point everyone realised, Shit, she must be really cold.
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