Anya Taylor-Joy Says Scary Movies Are Like Yoga
The Split actress explains why the genre’s so addicting, and why it’s annoying to go from blonde to brunette.
Talking to Anya Taylor-Joy is sort of like watching a suspenseful movie. With each passing moment, you’re sure something crazy’s about to go down—or, in this case, that the star can’t possibly this sweet and genuine—but with Anya, the big reveal never comes. She happens to be the real-deal: an insanely talented actress, who’s so passionate about her job, she starts to question if she sounds crazy while explaining it.
Anya’s newest film, Split, however, is full surprises you’d never (in a million years) expect, and not all of them are scary ones either. Some will make you think, and “the twist” will have you Googling, but it’s earning M. Night Shyamalan praise once again—and making us even bigger fans of Anya.
When we caught up with her, she explained why she enjoys doing scary movies so much, along with her process for getting into character (spoiler alert: it seems intense). Anya also shared the struggles of going from blonde to brunette, and why a friend asked if she was balding one night at dinner.
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Category: Interviews
Rising star Anya Taylor-Joy: ‘I fled London at 14 because I was bullied so much’
Actress says she spent school years ‘crying in bathrooms’ after moving from Argentina
Model and actress Anya Taylor-Joy says she was so badly bullied at her west London school that she fled to New York as a teenager to escape.
The rising star, now 20, was born in Miami then lived in Argentina until she was six. She said she struggled to be accepted after moving to Britain.
“When I was younger I didn’t really feel like I fit in anywhere,” she said.
“I was too English to be Argentine, too Argentine to be English, too American to be anything.”
The star said she had “a tough time” in the classroom.
“The kids just didn’t understand me in any shape or form, and I was really badly bullied,” she said. “I used to get locked in lockers, you know, barred from classrooms, not invited to things. It wasn’t pleasant.”
Taylor-Joy said she spent a lot of her time in school “crying in bathrooms”.
“We’re social creatures and we don’t do well when we’re not accepted, or when we feel like we don’t belong anywhere,” she said.
She said her decision to move to New York at 14 — then give up school two years later to act — “terrified” her family.
But at 17 she got her big break, when she was spotted by a modelling scout as she walked her dog outside Harrods, and she is now in the running for the EE Bafta Rising Star Award.
She faces competition from other up-and-coming talent including Ruth Negga and Tom Holland.
Past winners include James McAvoy, with whom Taylor-Joy is starring in her latest project, M Night Shyamalan’s Split.
She plays an abused woman in the film, a role which she found emotionally difficult.
She said: “My characters are incredibly real for me and I was just in so much pain for her.
“No one should ever have to endure that, and I don’t know where people get off thinking that they own other women’s bodies, because you are the only owner of your body and no one is allowed to touch you without your consent.”
Anya Taylor-Joy: meet the actress on the cusp of Hollywood superstardom
She terrified audiences in The Witch and played Barack Obama’s girlfriend in Barry. Now Anya Taylor-Joy is starring in M Night Shyamalan’s new thriller and competing for a Bafta. She talks to Samuel Fishwick about overcoming the school bullies and ‘pranking’ James McAvoy
For someone on the cusp of Hollywood superstardom, with its fans, foes and endless requests for selfies, Anya Taylor-Joy is refreshingly off-duty around strangers. She stoops to stroke someone’s puppy outside The Ivy Kensington Brasserie where we meet, cheerfully asks for a cigarette lighter from a passerby and gives me a massive hug as a greeting.
The Bafta Rising Star nominee, 20, is in the middle of a full-on press tour for M Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, Split, and only arrived in London on a flight from New York an hour before we meet. Wearing a short leather miniskirt with bare legs despite the cold, her blonde hair pulled back in a jaunty high ponytail, she’s quick with smiles and laughter and her mood seems high-octane and excitable — but isn’t she tired?
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OUR ISSUE 11 COVER STAR ANYA TAYLOR-JOY ON HER FIRST LOVE AND FITTING IN
There’s being dedicated and there’s being dedicated. Anya Taylor-Joy is dedicated. Such is the staunchly committed work ethic of the 20-year-old actress that she’s not averse to filming “intense” scenes – involving hysteria, tears and tunnels – amid a rather serious bout of food poisoning. “I would be there doing the scene, fighting the urge to be so violently ill and then they would cut and I’d just go to the side and throw up a couple of times in a bucket,” she says, of a recent experience. But for her it’s all part of the job. “By the end of that day I went home and I was like, ‘What did I just do? That was insane’.” And she wouldn’t have it any other way: “But we got the shot.”
That work ethic is also the reason why the past two years have seen her fast-tracked to breakthrough actress status with the success of her role as Thomasin in The Witch, the supernatural horror that is both harrowing and beautifully bleak, directed by Robert Eggers. The eldest daughter in a devout Christian family who move to New England in the 1630s, Thomasin is blamed for the disappearance of her baby brother and the bewitching of her other younger brother. The Guardian praised Anya’s performance as Oscar-nominee-worthy, Vanity Fair described her as being “destined for big things”, and Variety singled her out as pretty much owning the whole film.
“MY FIRST LOVE IS NOT A BOY; IT’S ACTING,”
Until the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, no one in Hollywood had heard of Anya Taylor-Joy, a wide-eyed teenager from Miami, Florida starring in the low-budget horror movie The Witch. But that was just the beginning of things for the young model-turned-actress. “Everything changed really, really quickly after that movie and it’s continuing to change,” she says. “I went to Sundance and didn’t really go home.”
Now, Taylor-Joy is starring Morgan, a sci-fi film produced by Ridley Scott, and Barry, the Barack Obama biopic that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and regularly wears brands like Chanel and Gucci. For these reasons, we crowned her the new indie queen in W‘s Royals portfolio, and paired her with actress Elle Fanning, an equally stylish teenage actress who, too, I poised beyond her years.
