Anya Taylor-Joy's eyes instantly catch when she casts a direct gaze.
She controls the gesture very well and uses it cautiously, shyly one would say.
The same thing happens with his face, endowed with a youthful appeal until it unfolds into a singular and somewhat Picassian beauty and until his posture forgets the joviality falling into the secrecy of the
Westworld
robots
or the Mother of
Raised by Wolves
.
It is a cocktail between a girl and a mature, intelligent and innocent woman.
He speaks English, French and Spanish with a Buenos Aires accent.
This is his native language, but it is also the one that puts him the most ashamed when he speaks in public, hidden behind the British accent he learned with Harry Potter.
The reason?
It is the language of his heart, that of being at home, that he speaks with his loved ones.
And that's the piece of Anya that this 24-year-old star - a young actress who in one month sneaked into more than 62 million homes around the world thanks to the
Lady's Gambit
series
- does not want to publicize.
“There is a part of me that the closest people know and understand, but that I am not prepared to share with everyone.
I will be one day, but that day is not today ”, she advances calmly and emphatically.
His year has been 2020. Quite a paradox, taking into account how it has been for ordinary mortals.
The detail does not escape him, but he does not hide it either.
As she says, looking back, there are many feelings.
"This pandemic has caused a lot of suffering, but personally it has offered me a space to assimilate everything that is happening to me," he sums up with that voice that retains a slight tone of adolescent excitement until it becomes serious, modulates the bass and sounds like a queen of terror.
The past was the consummation of a six-year career working with little rest.
Anya Taylor-Joy, in a shot of one of the chapters of the series 'Gambit de dama', the work that has catapulted her to stardom Netflix
A year that began with the premiere of
Emma
, a new adaptation of the novel by Jane Austen that brought Taylor-Joy to a wider audience than her previous forays into the world of horror.
It also premiered
The New Mutants
and went through
Madame Curie
, but the explosion was
Lady's Gambit
.
The Netflix series was number one in 63 countries.
The chess page Chess.com multiplied by five the number of visitors after seeing the adaptation of the novel by Walter Tevis and the sale of game boards multiplied by 250. All thanks to the character of Beth Harmon and her story of personal improvement as chess queen in the sixties.
And given that 37 years have passed since the publication of the novel, it is impossible to deny the weight that Anya has had in the success of this adaptation.
"I can't be objective," she says humble but without blushing.
“Since I read the book, something resonated with me: the idea that sometimes we are our own worst enemy.
The fact that we have demons but that it is possible to overcome them, especially together;
a message that at least touched my heart.
I always give myself a lot.
To all my characters.
But no one like Beth has so much of me.
I cried when I finished the book, I cried when I finished the script, I cried at the end of filming, but also thanks to Beth I exorcised many of my demons that are now resting.
For that I will be eternally grateful ”.
"The pandemic causes suffering, but it has offered me a space to assimilate everything that is happening to me" Pip
What are those demons that you mention so much, but don't want to talk about?
Director M. Night Shyamalan maintains that they are actor things.
He worked with Taylor-Joy on two occasions.
He saw her grow between the films
Multiple
(2016) and
Glass
(2019), with which he made her known, even being overshadowed in both cases by James McAvoy.
"All actors have their vulnerabilities and they don't hide them," he points out, pointing to those demons as if they were the reason for his talent.
"Anya is very complicated, but that makes her magical as soon as you see her."
This is how he describes the actress.
For his part, McAvoy is not interested in the past, only the present of an actress he envies.
And he talks about her like this: “She has such talent in its purest form.
Beautiful and interesting, yes, but her presence and her intuition is enviable.
And it is given.
It's not that he doesn't have a technique, it's that he doesn't need it.
It has something that cannot be learned.
And someone who knows a lot about technique says it ”, says the Scottish interpreter who had grown up in the theater before being part of the X-Men.
And another approach to the protagonist of
Lady's Gambit
: “We have that bond of trust that we have formed and that we push to the limit to make our work exciting and at the same time perfect.
As it should be ”, sums up Robert Eggers, the director who discovered her with
The Witch
(2015) and who has just worked with her again on
The Northman
.
Still from 'The Witch', directed by Robert Eggers (2015) and Taylor-Joy's first film work.
Mary Evans AF Archive / agefotostock
Taylor-Joy is the result of the union of a banker involved in the world of motor boating, Dennis Taylor, of Argentine and Scottish blood, and Jennifer Marina, Anglo-Spanish with some blood from Zimbabwe and also from Zaragoza, where she is the grandmother of the actress.
Taylor-Joy, the little one, has been with her older sister for more than 30 years (there are six) and seven with her previous one.
“I adore my family, even though I spent my life surrounded by adults.
I never felt like a girl.
I'm not complaining, just that I spent a long time alone, on my own, playing in forests where I invented creatures, witches, magical beings.
I edited entire works in Spanish.
And while my family was very athletic, I was a bookworm ”, he remembers his childhood in Argentina, where he arrived with his parents and brothers from Miami, the city where he was born.
The scene changed radically when the family moved to England.
She was six years old and had to exchange forest dogs, cats, horses and ducks for a three-legged hamster in a London flat.
“I felt so confused and displaced… I just wanted to go home,” she recalls.
She decided not to learn English and thus spent two years, to see if her parents would send her back to Argentina.
"Clearly, it did not work," laughs now this in love with London, where the pandemic has passed and then the holidays, where he just bought a house and where his sense of humor comes from.
But his stomach and his heart are still Hispanic.
“Those churros with dulce de leche, the provolone bread, the empanadas… And now, the hugs, the way we hug almost without realizing it.
That's what I miss ”.
At the age of 5, he asked his parents for an artistic agent as a gift.
At 14 he told them he was going to New York.
Now he dreams of filming in Spanish and of taking back Beth Harmon, his character in 'Lady's Gambit'.
Pip
What never changed, neither in Argentina nor in England, was his dream.
Or rather, her determination, because at the age of five she did not tell her parents that she would like to be an actress.
He asked for an agent, like someone who asks for a doll for Reyes.
And at 14 it is not that he left home but almost, because he had saved the money for the plane to New York.
“I was having a really bad time at school and I just told them: 'I'm not going any more and I have a ticket to New York.
I can count on your support or I can just walk away. '
They were amazing with me, ”she recalls now.
It sounds like part of the script for
Lady's Gambit
, but that's Anya, driven by acting as Beth pursued her passion for chess.
“Beth and I had problems since we were little.
And also older.
We always feel alone, as separated from the world by a glass.
A world we didn't fit into.
It has been a long way to understand that I do not have to fit into one thing to make others feel comfortable, "he says.
There are elements that have been changing in that time.
The narrative of his "invisible friends", of "his monsters under the bed that are real", phrases that he mentioned so much at the beginning of his career and that he now denies as if he had never said it.
Or that other moment
a star was born
that counts so many times: the first day of filming in
The Witch
, when, without knowing what a brand was or what it meant to be the first on the film sheet, she knew that this was her place. in the world.
“I remember that in
Multiple
I had to scold her as I do with my children because she lost the script during a night out with the other actresses in the film,” Shyamalan recalls today, “but in
Glass
I saw her become an aspiring director. , always looking at the shots over my shoulder ”.
The actress, in her role as young Emma in the film 'Emma', by Autumn de Wilde (2020), based on the novel by Jane Austen.
Working Title Films (Album
The stories that have not changed with time or fame are that of her discovery as a model while walking her dog in heels past Harrods in London.
Or the moment, also fortuitous, in which Allen Leech (
Downton Abbey
) met Anya in a photo session and put her in contact with her agent (she still is).
Currently, Anya is piling up projects.
Edgar Wright's
Last Night in Soho
, which is already shooting.
Or
The Northman
, an epic Viking movie that brought her out of confinement to fight the elements alongside Eggers in Ireland (where, by the way, she took a chess board as well as her candles, shawls and notebooks, in those who write daily to feel at home).
Next stops,
Furiosa
, the prequel to
Mad Max: Fury Road
directed by George Miller and where Anya will be a young Charlize Theron ("a great inspiration and great luck," he sums up), and the adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Laughter in the Dark
, again with Scott Frank, her director in
Lady's Gambit
.
“With Anya you make a friend forever,” summarizes the actress Mia Goth, part of Taylor-Joy's artistic family after working with her in Asturias under Sergio Gutiérrez Sánchez in
Marrowbone
and later in
Emma
.
The actress at the 2018 Bafta Awards for British Film at Kensington Palace.
Camera Press
Yes, Anya likes to repeat.
“There is nothing better than my bond with the directors.
They understand my vulnerability.
It is like a drug.
Again, I love acting and there are also all the things that come with it, which are wonderful, ”he reiterates.
It does not necessarily refer to fame, who shuns laughing at the moment he knew he had made the jump, with his photograph on the sides of buses in London, only to see his face dirty with mud when, because of the pandemic ,
Emma's
promotion
stayed in the marquees for months.
He also doesn't say it for those other perks like red carpets or fashion, although he loves clothes now.
In fact, he has kept a few models of the ones he wore in
Lady's Gambit
.
There is still a normal Anya, the one who misses the Berlin nightclubs where she went unnoticed dancing in the crowd at the end of the long days of filming the series "surrounded by humanity."
Or the one with a soft spot for
Count Me-In
teen movies
.
"Go crying," he describes.
He loves Tilda Swinton and laughs remembering his crush on Devon Sawa, the boy from Casper (1995).
What is missing from this
work in progress
that Anya is —as she describes herself— is that film in Spanish.
“I'm waiting for the right person, the perfect project,” he muses, thinking aloud how much he identifies in heart and brain with Guillermo del Toro.
“And it would be especially fun to do it in Spain, a place where there is a lot of passion.
But to know if he would be able.
Spanish continues to be a sacred language for me ”.
It's easier for him to think of a future for Beth Harmon
from Lady's Gambit
.
It is not something that is going to happen for sure, but it intrigues him.
"I would be fascinated to see her as a mother," she says.
And your own ambition?
“The word ambition sounds negative when applied to a woman and I don't like that.
Of course I have ambitions.
I am ambitious with my work, I am ambitious wanting to go further, looking for new opportunities.
I'm one of those who think that if you don't grow up, you'll die.
And I plan to continue growing as much as possible ”.
As a result of her stellar appearance on the Netflix series 'Lady's Gambit', the actress - born in Miami in 1996 and raised in Argentina - has accumulated film projects.
Pip