Anya Taylor-Joy: ‘I had trouble making friends’ – The Queen’s Gambit star talks loneliness, addiction and starring opposite Chris Hemsworth in 2023’s Mad Max prequel Furiosa
- After starring in Peaky Blinders, Taylor-Joy will be opposite Margot Robbie, Christian Bale, Robert de Niro and Rami Malek for David O. Russell’s new movie
- She bagged a Golden Globe portraying Beth Harmon in the Netflix series, but didn’t start speaking English until age eight, learning from Harry Potter books
In The Queen’s Gambit, Taylor-Joy plays Beth Harmon, an orphan whose astonishing gift for chess enables her to escape poverty and become a top player in a male-dominated world. Along the way, she becomes friends with Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), another rising chess star, but nonetheless feels increasingly isolated in the sport’s hermetically sealed environment and becomes addicted to alcohol and drugs in her rise to the top. Taylor-Joy – who turns just 25 on April 16 – immediately identified with her character, having experienced the kind of isolation that came with being a teenage actress spending much of her time living and working among adults.
I was lonely as a kid because I had trouble making friends. That’s still the case today. However, I think the kind of loneliness I felt growing up was one of the things that led me to getting into acting
“I saw a lot of parallels between the two of us,” Taylor-Joy told STYLE. “Beth is an inherently lonely person, and that was something I definitely struggled with growing up. She’s desperately looking for a place where she fits in and where she feels like she can contribute something. For her, that’s chess, and for me, it’s acting. I felt very connected to her on that front.”
Audiences and critics alike were captivated by her stark yet vulnerable portrait of a young woman, determined to show that she was capable of not only competing against, but defeating the chess world’s greatest players in a sport hitherto reserved only for men. Harmon’s chess genius turned her into a celebrity in the same way that real-life chess prodigy Bobby Fischer began attracting mainstream media attention as a teenage wunderkind who challenged Soviet chess dominance.
And, like Fischer, Harmon was a natural loner who lacked social skills and found it difficult to adjust to the spotlight, “and paid the price for her genius”, says Taylor-Joy. Fame merely intensified her loneliness and made her withdraw even further into her own drug-fuelled shell, a journey that made The Queen’s Gambit intoxicating to watch.
“What’s fascinating about Beth is that she’s an inherently lonely person and she cannot see past her own nose,” Taylor-Joy explains. “She feels she’s alone the whole time, and what’s beautiful about watching the series is that you realise that there are always people there [around her] who were holding her hand and there to help her out. But she couldn’t feel that … She genuinely feels alone, she genuinely feels abandoned.”