At the age of just 24, Anya Taylor-Joy already has a string of critically acclaimed performances under her belt, and her life story is just as interesting as the work she does on the screen. Born in Florida but raised in Buenos Aires, Taylor-Joy didn’t speak a word of English until she moved to London with her family at the age of eight.
After being discovered by a talent scout and starting off as a model, she went into acting and her first big screen credit ended up being left on the cutting room floor of dismal horror comedy Vampire Academy. Following a handful of TV gigs, she was then plucked from obscurity to headline Robert Eggers’ atmospheric chiller The Witch, receiving rave reviews in the process.
Following that, Taylor-Joy played the female lead in M. Night Shyamalan’s box office smash Split before reprising the role in Glass, and has since gone on to appear in Jane Austen adaptation Emma, comic book dud The New Mutants, small screen hit Peaky Blinders, and will next be seen in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. Not only that, but she can currently be found as the lead in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, which dominated the conversation for weeks and became one of the streaming service’s most popular original shows ever.
Despite experiencing such success at a young age, though, the modest actress doesn’t view herself as a star, and even thinks that she’s too weird-looking to be described as such.
“I have never and I don’t think I will ever think of myself as beautiful. I don’t think I’m beautiful enough to be in films. It sounds pathetic and my boyfriend warns me people will think I’m an absolute d*ck for saying these things, but I just think I’m weird-looking. I won’t go to the cinema to watch my own films. The beauty of being in your own skin is that you don’t have to look at your face.”
The Queen’s Gambit has made Anya Taylor-Joy an early frontrunner for virtually every television awards ceremony under the sun, and with her profile only set to rise even higher in the coming years, she’ll definitely have to get used to the idea of being a movie star.