Anya Taylor-Joy

The meeting that ended a future in ballet

Anya Taylor-Joy was walking near the Harrods department store when a black car began following her. She thought she was in danger and quickened her pace, but the voice that came from the vehicle belonged to Sarah Doukas, the woman who had discovered Kate Moss years earlier. She was 16 years old, and that chance encounter in London put an end to her plans of becoming a professional ballet dancer for good.

She signed with a modeling agency, but her real goal was scripts. During a photo shoot, she met the actor Allen Leech, who put her in touch with his agent after hearing her talk about her acting ambitions. That is how she landed her first serious audition.

Luck had nothing to do with what came next.

In 2015, Robert Eggers was looking for a lead for The Witch who did not have a contemporary kind of beauty. The film was shot in the forests of Canada under extreme cold conditions that pushed the crew to their physical limits. Taylor-Joy played Thomasin with a restraint that caught critics' attention at the Sundance Film Festival.

She turned down a Disney offer to star in a teen series on the same day she was confirmed for the Eggers role. It was a risky bet, as she chose auteur cinema over the financial security of a major corporation. In 2016, she worked with M. Night Shyamalan on Split and learned to handle the pressure of a big-budget Hollywood production.

The Chessboard and the Technical Demands

The release of The Queen's Gambit in 2020, during the lockdown months, sent her popularity soaring to levels no one in the industry had anticipated. She played Beth Harmon with absolute technical precision and spent months studying real chess moves so her hands wouldn't hesitate in front of the camera. The series drew 62 million views in its first 28 days on air.

But her massive success did not change her standards when choosing projects. In 2022, she shot The Menu alongside Ralph Fiennes, seeking a dark satire about privilege and consumption. She prefers working with directors who have a strong aesthetic vision, even if that means physically exhausting shoots or isolated locations.

And the gamble on risk paid off.

George Miller was cast to star in Furiosa in 2024 without a conventional audition. The director only wanted her to read the monologue from Network in front of a camera to test her expressive power. During the shoot in Australia, she had just 30 lines of dialogue in a script that relied almost entirely on her body language and her gaze.

Years of back-to-back shoots

In 2025, she took part in the production of The Gorge alongside Miles Teller, directed by Scott Derrickson. She keeps a frenetic work pace that has her taking on back-to-back projects with barely any rest between roles. She doesn't use social media to share her private life and prefers that attention focus on her professional choices.

She shot Sacrifice in 2024 at locations in Iceland and Greece, directed by Romain Gavras. Filming this action thriller required complex logistics to coordinate an international cast in volcanic areas that are hard to reach.

The production of this latest project went over its initial budget of $50 million.