Image credits: Tom Newton
“I love a cape I just do, for every occasion,” says Anya Taylor-Joy. “I don’t think it’s only a special occasion thing. If I could wear a cape every day I would.” Which is lucky, because Jonathan Anderson caped her up to sit on the front row of hisdebut Dior womenswear show at Paris Fashion Week.
In Sydney to headline the biggest Australian movie ever made, and with two star-studded films about to hit cinemas, Anya Taylor-Joy is on the unstoppable ride of her life, and she’s doing it all her own
After sunset, Anya Taylor-Joy slips beneath the surface of Bronte rockpool. It’s the middle of August and the water is a bracing 16°C. Taylor-Joy, who spent a good chunk of the pandemic in Ireland filming the Viking epic The Northman, submerged in a sea so deep it looked almost black from the surface, is used to such temperatures. Cold doesn’t bother her. But she isn’t used to the current, the way that our Australian oceans rise to meet you, engulfing you in their embrace, at once both fearsome and totally alive.
| Anya Taylor-Joy attends the red carpet for 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' in London (England) on May 17.LIA TOBY |
Alonso Martínez
Mayo 24, 2024
In 2021, Anya Taylor-Joy had the honor of joining the list of personalities who have hosted the iconic comedy show Saturday Night Live, and she took the opportunity to remind the audience that she is proudly Spanish-speaking. At the end of her monologue, the actress — who at the time was gaining recognition for her work in the acclaimed series The Queen’s Gambit — requested to conclude in her native language, and displayed an impeccable Argentine accent that moved the Latino community.
PHIL BRAY/NETFLIX | COURTESY OF NETFLIX | COURTESY OF NETFLIX
by Margaret Gardiner October 30, 2020
"I remember these boots I had when I was about 11, that were very specific and different, quite chunky. I had to put them on outside the house so my mother wouldn’t question me on the choice”, delights Gabriele Binder, the Costume Designer of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit.
The glossy series on an orphaned girl’s inexorable rise to chess stardom is now the streamer’s most-watched scripted limited series of all time
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And yet, as of this week The Queen’s Gambit is Netflix’s most-watched scripted limited series to date – a slightly convoluted and dubious record, given that Netflix measures a “view” as anything more than two minutes of content, but still, attracting 62 million account viewers during its first month is an impressive feat. (For comparison, Tiger King, the docuseries on America’s private exotic zoos that blew up at the outset of quarantine, drew 64 million account viewers in its first month.)
How to explain the surprising dominance of a period miniseries about one girl’s inexorable rise to the heights of international chess prestige? For anyone who’s fallen into it – and with the entire show released at once mere weeks before a bruising and protracted US election, The Queen’s Gambit was ripe binge material – the answer is in the immersion. The Queen’s Gambit is grade-A escapism: a classic sports underdog story injected with Netflix capital, an uncomplicated pleasure of sumptuous, meticulous styling, a soothing portal into another world which believes in talent as the one invincible currency.
The Queen’s Gambit plays, especially in its early episodes, as a matured rendition of classic, beloved Roald Dahl coming-of-age stories. Orphaned at age nine by a car crash, Beth Harmon (played in the first episode by Isla Johnston) is sent to the barren Methuen Home for Girls in Kentucky; lonely save for one fellow orphan, Jolene (Moses Ingraham), and plied with tranquilizers, Beth hides out in a dingy basement and befriends the gruff janitor Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp), who introduces her to chess. Her prodigious skill is undeniable, her consumption by chess whole – by day, she schools Mr Shaibel, inhaling lessons echoed throughout the rest of the series; by night, she envisions boards and maneuvers upside-down on the ceiling, her mind an endlessly capable expanse.
Walter Tevis, the author of the book upon which the Netflix hit is based, spent his life gambling and drinking in pool halls before turning to chess. But once you know his story, it’s stunning that the book ever came out at all.
say you’re the real thing,” says a reporter from Life magazine in Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit. The “real thing” she is addressing is the book’s protagonist, a 13-year-old chess prodigy named Beth Harmon who just won the Kentucky State chess championship—a remarkable feat not only because of her age but, at the time, her gender. The interviewer prods her to talk about chess as a sport: how she is competitive, how she “plays to win,” how she is “out for blood.”
| Anya Taylor-Joy The Queen's Gambit |
Anya Taylor-Joy plays a 64-square prodigy in Netflix’s gorgeous Walter Tevis adaptation, which – while heavy on rags-to-riches fantasy – proves great fun
Lucy Mangan
Friday 23 October 2020
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As such, there is plenty to like and to admire in this new, seven-part drama (starring first Isla Johnston then Anya Taylor-Joy as the prodigy Beth Harmon). We watch her become addicted both to the pills handed out – legally, apparently, in the 1950s when her story begins – to the children every day to keep them calm and compliant and, gradually, to the chess board and the control and solace it offers. Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp) introduces her to the coach of the local high school’s chess team and from thereon she is away, powering through the ranks until she becomes a giant-slaying grandmaster. Adoption by a local couple does not turn out to be the hoped-for domestic idyll, but when the husband abandons his alcoholic wife, Alma (a heartbreaking performance by Marielle Heller, more usually found directing the likes of A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and Can You Ever Forgive Me?), she and Beth form a fragile connection that is strengthened when Alma discovers that winning chess tournaments can be quite the money-spinner. Soon they are travelling the country and then the world together, with Alma turning Beth into her drinking buddy as they go. She’s a pill-popper, too, and refilling her prescriptions provides Beth with a nice little supply of tablets of her own.