Flaunt Magazine

Flaunt Magazine



Anya Taylor-Joy | That Nomadic Depth of Feeling

FLAUNT – “It was definitely the bloodiest and dirtiest I have ever been in my life,” laughs actor Anya Taylor-Joy, recounting her “war stories” from the set of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in which she stars as the titular lead. “I remember looking at my makeup artist at one point and saying, ‘I am filthy right now!’” she recalls, sharing nothing prepared her—not even her annual trips to Glastonbury, her favorite festival, where she’s well-used to being knee-deep in mud and grime.

Taylor-Joy is almost unrecognizable in the film, covered in the deep red earth of Australia’s outback where filming took place. It’s a far cry from how she looks this morning when we speak, freshly cleansed and make-up-free, her long, recently washed hair still drying. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road and the fifth installment of the Mad Max franchise that began in 1979, all co-written and directed by Australian filmmaker George Miller. They’re filmed in various rural locations across Australia where extreme heat comes as standard, as does dust and dirt from outback wildernesses that neatly double for Miller’s dystopian, post-apocalyptic near-future.

The wild landscape Taylor-Joy found herself in felt even more apocalyptic, she says, because filming took place during deep-COVID-19 lockdown and she didn’t see anyone who wasn’t cast or crew for six months. “It was a very trippy experience,” she says. “There were moments when I realized I hadn’t seen a single person who [wasn’t] a part of the film for months.”

At the end of each day, she returned to Sydney’s eerily deserted streets and her rented apartment with only a kitten for company. She especially missed her “big Latin family,” made up of her Spanish mother, Argentine father, and her five older siblings. Today, family is closer to home as we’re talking at her parents’ house in London. She looks bright-eyed, happy and relaxed as she sits in a comfy chair with her legs hunched up, nursing a morning coffee. She’s “thrilled” to have some rare time off with them over the next few days.
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Anya Covers Vogue Australia

Anya Covers Vogue Australia

Anya Taylor-Joy on ‘Furiosa,’ marriage and falling in love with Australia

VOGUE AUSTRALIA – 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.

Today, the 28-year-old fashion darling—she is Dior’s global ambassador for women’s fashion and beauty, house ambassador for Tiffany & Co. and global ambassador for Jaeger Le-Coultre—is wearing her new purchase like a dress, accessorised with a pair of molten gold Tiffany & Co. cuffs. Sitting opposite Taylor-Joy in her hotel suite, among the breakfast detritus (fruit platter and an empty French press) is her Furiosa co-star, Chris Hemsworth. As the pair prepare to share their Mad Max prequel with the world, we listen in on their wide-ranging conversation.

Continue reading: Vogue

Anya for British GQ

Anya for British GQ

Anya Taylor-Joy’s Dark Material

BRITISH GQNaturally, 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

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” London Photocall

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” London Photocall

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” UK Premiere

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” UK Premiere