Anya Taylor-Joy made chess cool again with her role as Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit – but it almost didn’t happen.
In her cover story interview with Elle’s May 2021 Rising Stars issue, Anya revealed that sometime before landing her game-changing role, she came to a point where she was seriously considering acting. Luckily, her Emma co-star and good friend Mia Goth was there to convince her otherwise.
“I had been working back-to-back — just before Emma, I’d done two projects at the same time, and I was going through some emotional relationship stuff. So at the beginning of 2019, I was just really broken and frightened of everything, and Mia and I were driving back from rehearsal,” she shared. “I turned to her and said, ‘I think I’m going to quit acting. I don’t think I can do this.’ And I’ve never seen Mia look so worried in my life.”
ICYMI, Anya and Mia became are uber close – and they’ve got each other’s back. As Anya tells it, “She was the first actress close to my age that I met, and we had a very cool conversation where I was like, ‘I love you,’ and she said, ‘I love you.’ And I said, ‘I’m always going to have your back.’ She was like, ‘I’m always going to have your back.’ It was like, ‘OK, cool. Let’s progress in this very wild industry, knowing that we’re going to take care of each other.'”
Anya telling her that she wanted to quit acting understandably got her friend very concerned. And something Mia said finally convinced her to keep at it.
“She was like, ‘But…that’s what you do. You can’t not…what are you talking about?’ I was like, ‘I think I need to back out now and just let it be and try to take care of my heart.’ And she was like, ‘No, that would be really bad. You can’t not have the thing that is your oxygen.’ I’m really glad she said that,” she recalled.
During the interview, Anya also revealed why acting was a huge part of her life – because of all the bullying she experienced growing up.
While Anya was born in Miami, Florida, she’d grown up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. When she was six, her family moved to England – and the move wasn’t exactly a fun experience for Anya.
“I joke about this, but I’m kind of serious when I say that the characters in the Harry Potter books were my friends. I spent the first two years in England playing hand-clap games with plants — if you slap them hard enough, they clap back — and learning how to read,” Anya admits. “That was my existence. I didn’t hang out with other kids. I was clearly a very normal child.”
She’s previously talked about being trapped in lockers and mocked for having wide-set eyes, but she no longer wants to give those stories “the airtime.”
She says acting “just really pushed me.”
“Much the same way as Beth needed chess, I needed acting,” she continues. “I needed to believe in a place where I could be valued and appreciated, and actually have something to contribute rather than constantly feeling like, ‘What is wrong with me, and why do I not fit in?'”
Anya has since made a name for herself in Hollywood – The Queen’s Gambit director, Scott Frank, was totally blown away by her professionalism and talent. And he’s predicts great things coming Anya’s way. “We’ll see Dame Anya Taylor-Joy, in her eighties, acting in some great piece of work, earning her nineteenth Oscar.”
