Anya Taylor-Joy

Anya Taylor-Joy was born on April 16, 1996, in Miami, Florida, to an Argentine-English mother and a Scottish-Argentine father. Her family moved to Buenos Aires when she was an infant, and she later relocated to London at age six. She has described English as her first language and has spoken about feeling deeply connected to both Argentina and Britain.

Taylor-Joy began modeling as a teenager after being discovered outside a department store in London. Her acting career gained serious attention with Robert Eggers’s historical horror film The Witch, released in 2015. She played Thomasin, a teenager whose family faces religious paranoia and supernatural terror in seventeenth-century New England. The role earned her the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Actor and established her as a performer capable of carrying psychologically demanding material.

In 2016, she appeared in the science-fiction thriller Morgan and played Casey Cooke in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split. Casey is one of three kidnapped girls held by Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man portrayed as having multiple identities. Taylor-Joy returned to the role in Glass, the 2019 continuation connecting Split with Unbreakable. She also starred in Thoroughbreds, a dark 2017 thriller about two wealthy Connecticut teenagers planning a murder.

Her profile widened with Autumn de Wilde’s Emma, released in 2020. Taylor-Joy played Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen’s clever but socially misguided matchmaker, and received a Golden Globe nomination for the performance. That same year, she starred as Beth Harmon in Netflix’s miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. The series follows an orphaned chess prodigy’s rise through competitive chess, while addressing addiction, trauma, and isolation. Taylor-Joy won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the role, and the series became one of Netflix’s most watched limited productions.

Her later work includes Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller Last Night in Soho, Robert Eggers’s Viking epic The Northman, and the 2023 comedy-drama The Menu. In 2024, she played Imperator Furiosa in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. The part required intensive physical preparation and placed her at the center of a large-scale action production. Taylor-Joy married musician Malcolm McRae in 2022. Across her filmography, she has moved between literary adaptation, horror, television drama, and action cinema while repeatedly choosing characters defined by intelligence, resilience, and moral uncertainty.