Anya Taylor-Joy

Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy, born April 16, 1996, in Miami, Florida, to an English father and a Spanish-Argentinian mother, and raised between Argentina, Spain, and London, is one of the most striking and distinctive talents to emerge in international cinema in the 2010s, a performer of almost supernatural stillness, otherworldly physical presence, and an ability to inhabit period drama, psychological horror, and contemporary thriller with equal conviction who has built an extraordinary body of work in her twenties that marks her as one of the most exciting screen presences of her generation. She grew up speaking Spanish as her first language before moving to London at age six and learning English — the experience of linguistic displacement and cultural dislocation between Argentina and England has, by her own account, given her a facility for inhabiting outsider characters that she draws upon constantly. She began modeling as a teenager in London before being discovered by a scout outside the Natural History Museum in Kensington and landing her first professional acting role in Robert Eggers's The Witch (2015), one of the most acclaimed horror films of the decade, in which she played the seventeenth-century Puritan girl Thomasin whose family disintegrates under forces both supernatural and psychological — a debut performance of such poise, intelligence, and physical authority that it immediately established her as a filmmaker's actor of unusual promise. She delivered equally acclaimed work in Morgan (2016), Split (2016, M. Night Shyamalan's psychological thriller in which she played the captive Casey Cooke with remarkable dignity and quiet force), Marrowbone (2017), Thoroughbreds (2017), Peaky Blinders (2019-2022 as Gina Gray in a recurring role), Emma (2020, Jane Austen's witty protagonist in a performance of deliciously ironic comic precision), The Queen's Gambit (2020, the Netflix limited series about chess prodigy Beth Harmon for which she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Limited Series and was nominated for the Emmy), Last Night in Soho (2021), The Northman (2022), and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), in which she played the origin story of Charlize Theron's iconic character.