Anya Taylor-Joy’s got the look in Last Night in Soho
Face of The Year Anya Taylor-Joy captivates in Edgar Wright’s retro psychological thriller, Last Night in Soho.
At its annual shindig in New York last week, the powerful council of fashion designers of America created a brand new award, anointing actor Anya Taylor-Joy Face of the Year.
More like Face of the Century.
Ever since Taylor-Joy entranced the world with her turn as genius chess player Beth Harmon in streaming juggernaut The Queen’s Gambit, that face, now 25 years old, has been seemingly everywhere and shows no signs of disappearing.
Taylor-Joy has a rarefied beauty, possessing large, wide-set eyes and high cheekbones, but also astonishing poise – she attribute her languid movement and elegant gestures to having studied ballet as a child – all of which means she looks spectacular in stunning frocks.
And, as brand ambassador for Dior’s fashion and makeup, she has explored this talent to dominating effect on red carpets around the globe.
Her otherworldly quality also makes her perfect for casting in a wide range of roles – like the awkward, ungainly but striking Harmon, a role she inhabited utterly, and before that swanlike Regency Emma from Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of the Austen novel, or retro songstress Sandie in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, out in Australia next week.
If that’s not enough, next will come a star turn alongside Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgard in The Northman, directed by David Eggers, who had provided Taylor-Joy’s breakthrough in The Witches. She also has completed an untitled David O’Russell movie again alongside Nicole Kidman, while her biggest role yet will surely be in George Miller’s blockbuster, Furiosa, the origin story of the character played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, co-starring Chris Hemsworth. That film shoots in Australia next year.
So we’re going to see a lot more of that unusual face – she concedes people tend to look at her even when she’s not in actor mode.
“People do stare at me, but I’ve been blessed with bad eyesight,” she says wryly.
She’s happy enough to leave the costumes to the screen and the red carpet. “I basically work every single day, which means that I’m usually in sweatpants, because you’re getting picked up at four o’clock in the morning and going home pretty late. So I just want to be comfortable.”
Anya Taylor-Joy in sweatpants? That’s tough to imagine. “I look like a child, I mean, I look like I’m 12 years old. I look very, very young.”
We are meeting the day after the world premiere of Last Night in Soho, Wright’s time-travel horror romp cum psychological thriller, at the Venice Film Festival, where Taylor-Joy was accompanied by musician boyfriend Malcolm McRae.
Taylor-Joy captivates every moment she is on screen but the protagonist of the film is in fact Kiwi rising star Thomasin McKenzie. The film follows McKenzie’s fashion student Eloise, who after moving to London from Cornwall returns to the Swinging ’60s as a refuge from her difficult bullied contemporary life. There she slips into the body of vampish aspiring singer Sandie (played by Taylor-Joy, who also delivers a note-perfect rendition or Petula Clark’s hit, Downtown), only to discover there’s no such thing as the good old days.
Taylor-Joy attests to the chemistry that developed between the two young stars. “There’s definitely a point at like, six o’clock in the morning for the third week running with neon lights flashing in your eyes, where you need a friend. We were so lucky that we had this sisterly bond. Thomasin’s a very good listener and I’d like to believe I’m a good listener. And because of that we just kind of clicked into each other where it felt very natural. It was really nice to have a partner within a role.”
Born in the US, Taylor-Joy spent her early years in Buenos Aires before moving to England at the age of six. She refused to speak English for two years in the hope of returning to Argentina. She still considers herself Argentinian. “The majority of my family still lives there.”
She has a Latin soul, I suggest. She nods. “That’s actually been the toughest thing about working under Covid. It’s the lack of hugs. I love to start my day by hugging everybody, and then hugging everybody when I say goodbye. It’s just the Argentine way. So it’s weird when now we just elbow people.”
There’s a through-line, too, with Taylor-Joy’s past; she has spoken about openly, having left school at the age of 16 after being intensely bullied.
“I felt very uncomfortable in my day-to-day life and I felt very isolated … I had this intense desire and feeling that there was a world in which I made a bit more sense.”
That doesn’t mean it was easy, of course. But, she says, “I had this hunger, while not knowing anyone in the industry or having any idea how to be part of it. You need an agent to get a job and getting an agent is pretty stressful”.
Did the youngest of six children (four from her father’s previous marriage) ever think about why she became creative, given that her dad was a banker and her mother a psychologist?
“I think it was more a semi-necessity, because all of my siblings are so much older than me and no one would play with me. I don’t say this with any kind of ‘Poor me!’. Just no one wanted to play with the tiny child. So I had to be all the different characters. I had to be everyone in the story. I don’t know, I’ve just always done it. It makes me happy.”
Reviews of Last Night in Soho have been mixed, with audiences perplexed by a “twist” ending.
“The best films are those that provoke thought and keep you thinking about them afterwards,” says Taylor-Joy. “I don’t think it’s necessarily our job to spoon-feed people, because I don’t think people like to be spoon-fed. But if we can present a whole bunch of different ideas that merit conversation, I think that’s a good thing that the film can do.”
Wright has said he’s keen for audiences to have something to “chew on”.
In the film, Matt Smith plays Jack, Sandie’s agent and lover, who promises to make her a star. The former Doctor Who actor has joked about how he is no stranger to time travel, although here his Jack character is the manipulative, abusive villain of the piece.
In the present, too, a slimy cab driver comments on Eloise’s legs wanting to know if any models live with her.
Wright, who has long lived in London and currently lives in Soho, says he made the film as a warning against blind nostalgia, but admits there is a post-MeToo message too.
“I conceived the story a decade ago and did a lot of research, which was obviously brought into sharper relief by that movement. But of course the stories that we’ve heard in the last four years were all happening in the ’60s as well. And maybe the sad thing is that some of those stories will never be heard.”
Wright, a lover of horror films who made hilarious zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (as well as Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) had first met Taylor-Joy in Los Angeles following her stellar turn in The Witches at the 2015 Sundance Festival, where Wright had been on the jury.
“I didn’t plan on telling Anya about Last Night in Soho,” he recalls, “but I ended up telling her the whole movie with the idea of her playing Eloise, and she sort of said, ‘Oh, my God, that sounds amazing. I’d love to be a part of that’. Then three years later when we were actually writing the screenplay (which he co-wrote with Scottish writer Kristy Wilson-Cairns) the character of Sandie started to expand.”
By then Wright explains how he had not only been impressed by Taylor-Joy’s portrayal as a 17th-century pilgrim besieged by a supernatural force in The Witches, but by her turns as a woman held captive by James McAvoy in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and as a sharp-witted social outcast in dark comedy Thoroughbreds. “So I started to think Anya should play the ’60s part. When I sent her the script I was a bit nervous about how she would react, but she loved it and said she wanted to do it.”
As it happens, Wright was the key to Taylor-Joy’s casting in the movie that will cement her megastar status; George Miller’s Furiosa.
In March 2020, just before lockdown, Wright was at a dinner with Miller and invited the Australian director to see the first cut of Last Night in Soho.
“It was the first movie he’d ever seen Anya in,” Wright tells The Australian.
“I have a very vivid memory of this because obviously George Miller is a genius and also because it was really weird sitting in an empty restaurant just before the lockdown, where people were already starting to kind of flee and we were in an empty restaurant.
“George wanted to know about Anya as he was casting Furiosa. I just said, ‘Stop right there. She’s the person. She is a star’. I told him how I loved working with her and how she is such a professional. ‘You’ll love her.’ The next day he spoke to her on Zoom.
“I haven’t asked her agent for a 10 per cent commission, but I may,” he quips.
Wright had decided that he needed a younger actor to play Eloise and, after watching McKenzie in critically acclaimed 2018 film Leave No Trace, was convinced the New Zealander would be perfect. “Thomasin was so completely immersed in that character; she was so remarkably assured. Doing any kind of film shoot is a marathon anyway and she was in every single scene. So I was in awe of her maturity at that age to be able to channel the character.”
For Wright, it was also important to include classic ’60s actors in the cast, including Terrence Stamp, Rita Tushingham and, most prominently, Dame Diana Rigg. Eloise rents a vintage Soho flat from Rigg’s Ms Collins character.
The amiable boyish Wright, 47, who has a memory stretching back further than we might imagine, had already given the eccentric septuagenarian Sparks brothers their due in his first foray into documentary filmmaking earlier this year. Yet he will go down in history as the last person to work with Rigg, who died a year ago aged 82.
A British icon renowned for her role as Emma Peel in ’60s series The Avengers, Rigg had recently made her consummate presence felt as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, and now lifts Last Night in Soho to a higher level in the final scenes. The film opens with a dedication that simply reads “For Diana”.
Wright says. “The easy thing to say about Diana is how fortunate we were to work with her. It’s obviously terribly, terribly sad that she’s no longer with us and I miss her as a friend, because after the movie I stayed in touch with her. I had a wonderful run of gossipy brunches with Dame Diana Rigg.
“Even at the start of lockdown we would call each other and be talking about old movies and stuff. As somebody who’d grown up being such a fan of hers, to get to work with her and then to get to know her, was an honour. It’s sad it’s her last movie, but I can’t feel anything but joy that I had the chance.”
Last Night in Soho releases in cinemas on 18 November