Starring Anya Taylor-Joy

Jan

Jan 19, 2017

Anya talks with Evening Standard

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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Oct

Oct 16, 2016

Anya Covers Hunger Magazine

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,”

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Sep

Sep 19, 2016

Anya Taylor-Joy, the New Indie Queen

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.

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