From choosing her roles to chasing last-minute road trips, Anya Taylor-Joy moves on instinct.&nbsp;

PHOTOGRAPHY Szilveszter Mak&oacute;
STYLED BY Lisa Jarvis
Anya Taylor-Joy is always itching to take a road trip. &ldquo;I started doing them maybe like two years ago and now I&rsquo;m fully obsessed,&rdquo; she says over the phone. &ldquo;I love it. I&rsquo;ll do it any time off that I have.&rdquo;
It&rsquo;s a Sunday evening in mid-April, and the 30-year-old British-Argentine actor has just returned from one such road trip to Coachella, the annual music festival held in the desert about two hours east of Los Angeles. The highlights? A set by singer-songwriter Sombr&mdash;with whom Taylor-Joy was photographed hanging out backstage, alongside Korean pop star Ros&eacute;&mdash;and Ethel Cain&rsquo;s performance, which she calls &ldquo;a really big deal for me.&rdquo;
And then, of course, The Strokes.&nbsp;&ldquo;I never thought I&rsquo;d get the chance to see them,&rdquo; says Taylor-Joy, explaining that she and her husband, musician and actor Malcolm McRae, 32, play the indie rock band&rsquo;s albums on repeat at home. &ldquo;Hence why I have absolutely zero voice. I was screaming way too loudly at [lead singer] Julian Casablancas.&rdquo;

Post-concert rasp aside, Taylor-Joy&rsquo;s voice is actually deep and somewhat gravelly. Her subtle British accent is a result of a London upbringing, after spending the first six years of her life in Buenos Aires. Moving across the globe with her family at such a young age initially made Taylor-Joy feel alienated from her peers, which &ldquo;was difficult for little me,&rdquo; she recalls. &ldquo;But now I look at it with so much love, because I just think it perfectly set me up to live this kind of transient life.&rdquo;

She&rsquo;s still reluctant to call any one city her home, though she mostly splits her time between London and Los Angeles, where she lives with McRae and their pets: Yzma, a Doberman they rescued from a kill shelter during last year&rsquo;s wildfires (her name is an homage to an animated character in The Emperor&rsquo;s New Groove, voiced by Eartha Kitt, with whom Taylor-Joy is &ldquo;obsessed&rdquo;); and Kitsune, an Australian Ragdoll cat that she picked up in &ldquo;the wasteland&rdquo; while filming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and who now travels the world alongside her.
&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always been nomadic by nature,&rdquo; says Taylor-Joy. &ldquo;Now I&rsquo;ve just fully embraced it as part of who I am. If I have a couple of days off, I&rsquo;m always like, Ooh, what&rsquo;s within driving distance? If it&rsquo;s six hours or less, I&rsquo;m like, Let&rsquo;s go. Why not?&rdquo;

&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always been nomadic by nature. Now I&rsquo;ve just fully embraced it as part of who I am.&rdquo;

Time off is hard to come by for Taylor-Joy, who has been acting in a near-steady stream of movies and television shows for more than a decade, since her breakout role in the 2015 horror film The Witch. She stars next in this summer&rsquo;s Apple TV+ series Lucky, which finds her titular character on the run from both the FBI and a terrifying mob boss following a massive heist gone wrong. (&ldquo;By the way, how fabulous is Annette Bening?&rdquo; she says of her on-screen nemesis.) Lucky, not unlike Taylor-Joy, grew up moving from place to place&mdash;her father, played by Timothy Olyphant, is a con man&mdash;but the character&rsquo;s experience of transience is entirely different from Taylor-Joy&rsquo;s. She finds the contrast invigorating.

&ldquo;I was so attracted to playing somebody who was just so desperate to stay still and put down roots and form some kind of attachment where she didn&rsquo;t feel like the ground was going to fall away from underneath her,&rdquo; says Taylor-Joy, who credits her own sense of stability to her close family ties. &ldquo;I think there&rsquo;s been such a glorification of the hustle and the con, where we see it as very slick and jazzy and sexy. I was intrigued by the idea of, What is this actually like if you can&rsquo;t form any attachments to anybody? If you can&rsquo;t even give people your real name, how does that feel?&rdquo;

Production for Lucky kicked off in Las Vegas, where Taylor-Joy spent many of the 12-hour night shoots sprinting through the casino floor of Caesars Palace in assorted disguises. &ldquo;I have a real soft spot for Caesars Palace now&mdash;we&rsquo;ve been through a lot together,&rdquo; she laughs. &ldquo;And we pretty much kept up that pace the whole way through filming. I feel like I have literally run through most of California at this point.&rdquo;
Premiering on July 15, much of the crime thriller unfolds in the unforgiving desert, where Lucky escapes kidnappings and beatings, only to face a rattlesnake and nearly die of thirst. It&rsquo;s an extreme landscape with which Taylor-Joy has become surprisingly familiar, having also found herself in the desert while filming Furiosa and Dune: Part Two and Part Three, the latter of which is set for release in December.

&ldquo;It always makes me laugh, because I have no idea what it is about my hair, my skin tone, or the largeness of my eyes that makes anyone think I&rsquo;m suited to be a desert creature&mdash;but people love to put me there, and I do feel a real affinity for it,&rdquo; says Taylor-Joy. &ldquo;[Dune director] Denis [Villeneuve] and I talked about this a lot: There&rsquo;s a sacredness to the desert. There&rsquo;s something quite extraordinary about a place that is so seemingly desolate and barren, and there&rsquo;s such a starkness to putting people there.&rdquo; Her favorite thing about filming in the desert? &ldquo;Probably sunrise or sunset, because you see the most extraordinary colors&mdash;and you just feel like you&rsquo;re the only person in the world.&rdquo;

I think there&rsquo;s been such a glorification of the hustle and the con, where we see it as very slick and jazzy and sexy.

The six-month-long Lucky shoot, which began not long after the devastation of the Eaton and Palisades fires, proved to be cathartic. &ldquo;There had been a conversation about not shooting in LA, but one of the things I&rsquo;m most proud of is that we did keep [production] in LA and with an LA crew,&rdquo; says Taylor-Joy, who also served as an executive producer on the series, along with Reese Witherspoon, whose production company Hello Sunshine adapted it from Marissa Stapley&rsquo;s novel of the same name. &ldquo;I think everyone was just so happy to be with each other and working and doing something that felt constructive. I was with people who had just lost their entire homes, you know?&rdquo; Taylor-Joy was also grappling with a personal loss: her dog, Bartok, died the day filming began. &ldquo;We were all kind of experiencing something, and rather than sitting in it and just being in pain, we were working together and doing something.&rdquo;

For Taylor-Joy, producing felt like a logical next step in expanding her craft. &ldquo;The beauty of being a producer is that when a problem arises, you actually have the title where you&rsquo;re allowed to help out,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t have the title where you can help out, you kind of have to sit back and let the adults do the talking.&rdquo;
Having landed her first big acting role when she was still a teenager, Taylor-Joy knows what it&rsquo;s like to sit back and soak it all in. She dropped out of school at 16 and was cast soon after as the lead in The Witch, a low-budget independent film set in the 17th century. It did not exactly seem like it would be a blockbuster at the time: It featured a Satanic goat and was helmed by a then-unknown director, Robert Eggers. But the gamble paid off: After The Witch premiered at Sundance in January 2015, it was acquired by A24 and became an unlikely box-office success. It is widely considered one of the most iconic horror movies of the 2010s. (Taylor-Joy appeared to nod to the movie by celebrating her recent birthday with a goat-shaped cake.) The Witch also offered Taylor-Joy a crash course in acting, which she says she never formally studied, under veteran British actors Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson.

&ldquo;We were sitting in this motel in the middle of nowhere in Canada, and we&rsquo;d all have dinner together and afterwards they would say, Okay, I&rsquo;m gonna go off and do my work now. And I was too embarrassed to ask them what they were doing,&rdquo; Taylor-Joy remembers. Eventually, she got up the courage to ask about her co-stars&rsquo; routines, which she discovered sometimes involved practicing their lines in front of a mirror. Taylor-Joy says she tried it out, but felt that rehearsing made her characters less real to her.
&ldquo;I have to just get to know them, and that always feels a tiny bit scary in an exhilarating way, because a lot of the time I show up and I&rsquo;m like, Well, let&rsquo;s just hope that this works... I&rsquo;m waiting for something to strike me and to tell me to move, and I&rsquo;m not going to move unless it tells me to,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;So that always feels a tiny bit like Russian roulette, but thus far I&rsquo;ve learned to trust that process. And in the time of working, I&rsquo;ve met so many interesting people who have different methods where now I&rsquo;m like, Huh. I wonder if, just to shake things up a little bit, maybe I should try an acting class or something. Because I do love the craft.&rdquo;

Taylor-Joy compares acting to a form of meditation, almost like an out-of-body transcendence. For her, inhabiting a new character is &ldquo;like I get a roommate for a time, if that doesn&rsquo;t make me sound too crazy,&rdquo; she says, laughing. &ldquo;But you spend 14 to 16 hours a day being them, thinking the way that they think, and making the choices that they make&mdash;and there can&rsquo;t be any judgment. It just can&rsquo;t exist. So you have to just fully commit to whatever it is that they&rsquo;re doing.&rdquo;
In 2016, Taylor-Joy followed up her breakout role in The Witch with her portrayal of a kidnapped teenager in M. Night Shyamalan&rsquo;s psychological thriller Split. The next year, she returned to school&mdash;at least, the on-screen version of it&mdash;for another Sundance standout: Thoroughbreds, a dark comedy that saw her as a murderous academic. (Her 27-year-old co-star, Anton Yelchin, died unexpectedly before the movie premiered; Taylor-Joy was one of dozens of colleagues to remember Yelchin in Love, Antosha, a 2019 documentary film about his life.)

But it was Taylor-Joy&rsquo;s starring role in a TV series, The Queen&rsquo;s Gambit, a period drama about a troubled chess prodigy, that really made her a household name. The Netflix show began streaming in October 2020, at a time when many viewers were stuck at home under COVID lockdown, and quickly became the most-watched show on the platform. It remains one of the streamer&rsquo;s most popular scripted limited series of all time, having raked in 62 million viewers around the world in its first month alone. The Queen&rsquo;s Gambit led to Taylor-Joy&rsquo;s first Emmy nomination, followed by wins at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards. It also helped launch her status as a fashion darling: Within a year of the show&rsquo;s debut, she was named a global ambassador for both Dior and Tiffany &amp; Co. She&rsquo;s rarely slowed down since.

&ldquo;I never feel as much myself as when I&rsquo;m in motion, so I just sort of keep it going.&rdquo;

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s quite funny because I&rsquo;m most&mdash;I don&rsquo;t want to use the word stable&mdash;but I&rsquo;m most sedentary when I&rsquo;m actually working. If I have a call sheet and somewhere to kind of clock in every single day, that&rsquo;s the longest that I&rsquo;ll ever stay in one place for an extended period of time,&rdquo; says Taylor-Joy. &ldquo;If I&rsquo;m left to my own devices, I don&rsquo;t know... I never feel as much myself as when I&rsquo;m in motion, so I just sort of keep it going all the time.&rdquo;

When we speak, she&rsquo;s on a rare self-imposed spring break of sorts&mdash;not necessarily the relaxing kind, but one where she keeps moving. Post-Coachella, she&rsquo;s gearing up to embark on a week-long road trip with friends, winding her way from California to Florida&mdash;her accidental home state, since she was born while her parents were vacationing in Miami&mdash;to attend a wedding.
&ldquo;This is the first time that I&rsquo;ve actually taken intentional time off away from set, and I&rsquo;m filling it to the brim,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m having so much fun.&rdquo;
A few days later, dreamy photos of her road trip surface on Instagram and are quickly reshared by fan accounts. In one of them, she stands before a massive rock cliff in Zion National Park, arms outstretched, looking perfectly at peace in the desert.

HAIR: Gregory Russell THE WALL GROUP
MAKEUP: Georgie Eisdell THE WALL GROUP using DIOR BEAUTY
MANICURE: Kim Truong A-FRAME AGENCY
SET DESIGN: Nicholas Des Jardin STREETERS
PRODUCED BY: Dirty Pretty Productions, Abigail Perl, Felipe Torres Utro, Mateen Mortazavi, Ryan Gus, and Yousra Attia
DIGITAL TECH: DJ Dohar
PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Gianluca, Hector Perez, Alex Kennison, and Adam Ambriz
STYLING ASSISTANTS: Annina Luomahaora and Naiara Gomez

Anya Taylor-Joy Was Born to Roam

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