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.
Continue reading: GQ

Anya Taylor-Joy’s Summer of Love

After an intense and isolating Furiosa shoot, the star is reveling in married life with Malcolm McRae.

ELLE – 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.’”

Yet there she was on the sand-colored “red carpet” in custom Dior Haute Couture, a white cape framing her face (Hi!). Nearby, Zendaya stunned in retro-futuristic Mugler. But to industry watchers, that night was about more than fashion. It was the unofficial coronation of a new class of bona fide A-list movie stars in Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, and now Anya Taylor-Joy.

At 28, Taylor-Joy was a movie star with one tiny, pesky asterisk: She hadn’t actually starred in a blockbuster movie yet. That all changed this May with the launch of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. And it’s a seriously big swing. That last film made approximately $380 million worldwide and scored 10 Academy Award nominations, winning six. It was also a notoriously difficult shoot. After seeing the film, Steven Soderbergh muttered: “I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

Adding to the challenge, Taylor-Joy inherited the title role from Charlize Theron, who played the one-armed Furiosa with a buzz cut and indelible grit. The inevitable comparisons would be intimidating enough for any young actress, let alone one tasked with carrying her first global franchise. For Taylor-Joy, it turns out there was a more personal question at stake: Of her whirlwind career to date, she says, “I had no idea what it was to put myself first in any way or how I wanted to exist.”

Continue reading: Elle