She may have first caught people’s attention in the 2015 film The Witch, but Anya Taylor-Joy was arguably catapulted to stardom after starring in the Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit (oddly enough, she nearly gave up acting before landing the lead role). In the series, the actress played an orphaned chess prodigy who becomes addicted to prescription drugs.
Taylor-Joy received critical acclaim for her performance in the series. Unbeknownst to many, however, she also underwent an emotional ordeal while portraying the character.
She Took To The Character Immediately
Even before she landed the role, Taylor-Joy understood what Beth Harmon was all about straight away. After all, they’re both passionate women and the actress could understand one’s desire to devote everything to a single goal. “The way Beth feels about chess is basically exactly how I feel about my art,” Taylor-Joy explained while speaking with Observer. “Literally, I breathe it, I think about it all the time, it’s the thing that most excites me. I definitely nerd out over what I do.”
The series is based on the 1983 book by Walter Tevis of the same name and upon reading it, Taylor-Joy also readily figured out the story doesn’t exactly revolve around chess. And the actress said as much when she had a meeting with series co-creator Scott Frank.
“First of all, I ran to the meeting with Scott. I don’t run, that’s not something that I do really, but I ran to that meeting as soon as I finished the book, because I so excited and I just, I knew her so immediately,” Taylor Joy recalled during an interview with Deadline. “And the first thing I yelled at Scott across the restaurant was, ‘It’s not about chess. It’s about loneliness and trying to find your place and the price of genius, and what it is to be that other and attempting to find your world within that.’”
With everything that she learned, Taylor-Joy also realized that she wanted the part badly. “And yeah, I was desperate to tell this story. I fell in love with her immediately, and I really thought that I could do it right.” Going into it, Taylor-Joy also knew that it was going to take all of her to deliver the kind of performance that the series needs. She even told Vanity Fair, “The second I closed the book, it was this dawning of, I’m going to have to give this character so much of myself in order to tell the story right.”
How The Queen’s Gambit Became A ‘Psychological Warfare’ For Anya Taylor-Joy
Portraying a troubled lead character in a series was quite a challenge for Taylor-Joy. Aside from having to learn how to play chess well, there were some aspects of the character that were too close to home. “She’s a voice that I’ve had in my head and in my life for a very long time,” the actress explained. “There were some scenes that were just so close to the bone. They were experiences that I had had, or that I had been witness to and it was so real.”
At the same time, she also had to deal with a hectic production schedule, one that involved several projects at once. This left the actress drained, making her more emotionally vulnerable than she would have expected. “I’d worked back-to-back on two projects with one day off in between, so by the time I got to filming the show, I was exhausted and there was no energy to create a barrier,” Taylor-Joy explained during a virtual roundtable discussion with other drama actresses (including Elizabeth Olsen, Gillian Anderson, and Cynthia Erivo) for The Hollywood Reporter. She then had to learn to distinguish her own emotions from that of Beth’s.
“And that was potentially the toughest thing about the show, because it was a wonderful experience as an actor to be able to not have to reach for any emotion, but then you also have to go through the psychological warfare of figuring out, ‘Why do I feel so awful in the morning?’ Like, ‘What is happening?’” the actress recalled. “And then you go, ‘Oh, it’s not my feelings,’ but I have to sit in them all day and I have to be aware enough to go, ‘You are not depressed, the character is depressed, and at some point that will leave you.’”
And while the role left her in an emotional rollercoaster, Taylor-Joy also struggled to leave the character behind once production was over. It seems she’s also not completely sure if she had gotten over Beth completely even today. “It’s complicated. I don’t know. Different characters have different grieving periods,” the actress said. “Some of them don’t ever really go away. I have a feeling Beth is going to be one of those ones.”
Today, Taylor-Joy is set to star in several upcoming films. This reportedly includes a culinary horror comedy with Ralph Fiennes.
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