31
31
Why Anya Taylor-Joy, star of Super Mario Galaxy, fascinates us
Four years after the groundbreaking success of the gripping Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, the name Anya Taylor-Joy, 29, is everywhere. The international ambassador for Dior fashion and beauty, seen in Dune: Part Two, is now lending her voice to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Focus on a former bullied teenager who has become one of the most popular women in the world.
By Violaine Schütz.
Published on 14 May 2024. Updated on 31 March 2026.
When the excellent miniseries The Queen’s Gambit was released on Netflix six years ago, audiences were so enthusiastic that chessboards were sold out, and sixties fashion and flamboyant red hair were trending again. But the show also made Anya Taylor-Joy, who portrays a chess prodigy struggling with addictions, one of Hollywood’s most sought-after names.
Anya Taylor-Joy, the revelation of the hit series The Queen’s Gambit
The actress then starred in multiple projects, from Amsterdam to The Menu and Dune: Part Two alongside Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. She attended the Cannes Film Festival to promote the film Furiosa in 2024. A fierce, action-packed new chapter that proved she is now part of the big league. This Wednesday, April 1st, 2026, she surprises once again by lending her voice to Princess Peach in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
A complicated childhood
Before that, the actress appeared in Last Night in Soho directed by Edgar Wright (Baby Driver). In this dark, gory, pop-horror fantasy set in the 1960s, she plays a sexy, badass apprentice singer who ends up selling her body under the influence of a Machiavellian manager, rather than performing. Anya Taylor-Joy demonstrated phenomenal charisma, while showing she could both sing and dance.
This versatility is not new. Moving from one adventure, or country, to another seems to be in her genes. Born in Miami, Anya Taylor-Joy grew up with five siblings. Her mother, a psychologist of Spanish and English descent, was born in Zambia. Her father, a former Argentine-Scottish banker born in Buenos Aires, changed his life to devote himself to motor boating. The whole family lived in Argentina when Anya Taylor-Joy was just a baby, before moving to London.
A past marked by harassment and bullying
Stubbornly opposed to England, the little girl kept speaking Spanish only until the age of eight. “Argentina is all green and I had horses and animals everywhere. All of a sudden I was in a big city and didn’t speak the language. I didn’t really feel like I fitted in anywhere. I was too English to be Argentine, too Argentine to be English, too American to be anything. The kids just didn’t understand me in any shape or form. I used to be locked in lockers. I spent a lot of time in school crying in bathrooms,” the actress shared in the columns of the Evening Standard in 2017.
The childhood of the American-British star was marked by ups and downs, juggling between ballet classes to channel her excess energy and being bullied at school from the age of fourteen, which led her to go far away, to New York, and leave school two years later.
An actress spotted by the casting agent who discovered Kate Moss
It was in the United States that Anya Taylor-Joy first took acting classes as an escape from the daily bullying she endured in the schoolyard. Getting back at her classmates would have to wait. Three years after moving to the Big Apple, the then seventeen-year-old returned to London. There, she got noticed outside a store by casting agent Sarah Doukas — the woman who discovered Kate Moss — and immediately signed with a modeling agency.
The stars seemed to align for the Londoner, who, during a photoshoot with actors from the series Downton Abbey, confided to one of them, Allen Leech, her desire to work in the film industry. Like a fairy godmother, he introduced her to his agent. Anya Taylor-Joy’s got a mixed debut, with a modest appearance in the low-budget horror comedy Vampire Academy (2014). Her scene was ultimately cut from the final edit. A blessing in disguise?
A haunting performance in The Witch
After this forgettable incursion, the actress went on to make a string of interesting series and films with strong visual universes. She was seen in the fantasy series Atlantis (2014), the horror film The Witch (2015), which revealed her to the general public, the science-fiction feature film Morgane (2016) and then in the biopic Barry (2016), which tells the story of Barack Obama’s youth. The winner of the Trophée Chopard (at Cannes, in 2017) almost always attracts the admiration of critics with her inhabited acting and hypnotic gaze.
Mutinous, youthful, graceful and sometimes exuding a fascinating darkness, the actress’s strange, retro, very old Hollywood beauty evokes at once a blonde version of Christina Ricci, a hidden daughter of Mia Farrow and a modern Bette Davis. All of which attracted her to heroine roles with a gothic aura, such as that of a teenage victim of a kidnapper with multiple personalities in M. Night Shyamalan ‘s thriller Split (2017), or haunted appearances in the Spanish horror film The Secret of the Marrowbones (2017) or the moving historical mini-series Miniaturist (2017).
Peaky Blinders, Dune, Furiosa… Film productions with a distinctive universe
After starring in Radioactive (2020), Marjane Satrapi‘s biopic about Marie Curie, in the fifth season of the cult series Peaky Blinders (2019) alongside Cillian Murphy, and in a new Jane Austen adaptation, Emma (2020), nothing seems to be stopping the actress. Directors call her for blockbusters, like Marvel’s The New Mutants (2020), or daring series, such as The Queen’s Gambit (2020), which earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Miniseries. The dazzling star of Last Night in Soho will be the main focus in years to come.
Anya Taylor-Joy starred in The Northman (2022), a Viking revenge story set in Iceland in the 10th century and in Amsterdam (2022) with Christian Bale, Taylor Swift, Margot Robbie and Rami Malek. The Argentine-born, British-American actress also shone in the dark comedy The Menu in 2022.
In the columns of Numéro, the actress spoke about how she chooses her roles and her performance in The Menu: “I think characters choose you as much as you choose them. I definitely see a connection between all the characters I’ve played, in the sense that they’re usually outsiders who rebel and use their intelligence to overcome whatever situation they find themselves in. Which is always fun, because it means you go on a journey with them, with a clear evolution between where you start and where you end up. But yes, I loved that Margot (The Menu) had a sharp tongue and didn’t seem to care at all about what others thought of her. She was fun to play.”
Venturing into Romain Gravas’s cinema
But Anya Taylor-Joy’s most significant projects only came to fruition later. She played a small role in Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious feature Dune: Part Two (2024). It was followed by hypnotic red carpet appearances, where she sported sculptural gowns, from Dior to Maison Margiela Artisanal. The chameleon actress seems poised to morph into a major star very soon…
A prophecy that could well come true in the upcoming years. After lighting up the screen in the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa (2024), in a role previously played by Charlize Theron, the actress is set to move swiftly from one shoot to the next. Between Sacrifice, the next film by Romain Gavras, the Netflix thriller How to Kill Your Family, a biopic about Joni Mitchell, and ambitious projects for Apple TV+, Anya Taylor-Joy’s magnetic presence is set to haunt us for a long time… In 2026, we will hear her voice in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and see her face in Dune: Part Three and Lucky.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, coming out in theatres on April 1st, 2026.
