“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.”

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.”

“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 had a lot of imagination and as a result I kept creating a whole series of imaginary playmates. That makes it easy for you to be able to throw yourself into a character when you’re working on a set.”

A willowy, 178cm-tall (5 foot 10 inches) natural blonde, Taylor-Joy was born in Miami as the youngest of six children, but grew up first in Argentina where she spoke Spanish almost exclusively, before her family relocated to London when she was six. Young Anya was so dismayed at leaving her life in Argentina that she refused to speak English for her first two years in the UK. It was her way of emotionally blackmailing her mum and dad.

“I only learned English when I was eight because I was convinced that if I didn’t speak the language in England, my parents would be forced to take me back home [to Argentina], but of course that didn’t work out!” she laughs.

As it turned out, it was her uncle whom her parents brought in to get Anya’s English skills up to the level where she could fit into school properly in London.

“I had no friends growing up [in London], so I needed to learn the language pretty quickly. That’s where my uncle played such an important role in my life. He would sit me down with all the Harry Potter books to help teach me, so when I finally started to speak English when I was young I was quite precocious because I was learning from these books.”

A shy, introverted child, Taylor-Joy’s immediate kinship with Harmon made it particularly difficult for her to separate herself from her chess alter ego while shooting the series. Another factor that contributed to the particularly taxing nature of her performance was her natural tendency to throw herself into her characters, a process that dates back to her haunting breakthrough performance in the horror film The Witch (2015), M. Night Shyamalan’s sci-fi thriller opposite Bruce Willis, Glass (2019), and the TV series Peaky Blinders. Taylor-Joy says she simply can’t help herself from going down the wormhole with her screen creations.

“It was difficult keeping Beth away and something very draining. I had to learn how to separate my feelings from Beth’s and say: ‘This is not your [life], this is Beth’s’, but you still have to feel those emotions at the time you’re playing the character,” she said.

“But because Beth was such a strong personality, it made her easier to play on a certain level. That is both a wonderful thing and a tricky thing to handle because on the bright side you’re never reaching for emotion, you just show up and you are reacting to and experiencing what’s going on around you. And on the tougher side, if Beth was having a bad day, I was having a bad day.”

One of the most compelling elements to her portrayal of Harmon is how she managed to evoke the contradictory psychological process that informed her character’s addictive personality.

“In researching addiction, I found that one of the terrible ironies about it is that … whatever it was you were using to self-medicate, it [only] works for a [given] period of time,” Taylor-Joy explains. “What destroys you is when it stops working, which it inevitably will, and that’s when your life goes completely off the rails.”

Having studied ballet extensively in London while attending Queen’s Gate School, Taylor-Joy was perfectly equipped to appreciate the level of discipline and dedication required to excel in a supremely all-consuming sport like chess.

“I understand the level of obsession that chess players have because that’s the same level of obsession I have for my art. It’s the same thing. When people ask me what I do for fun, I tell them, ‘I make art’. That’s who I am, that’s what I do. And for very serious chess players it’s the same. That’s why I wanted to make sure that the people who are so devoted to this world and who watch the series will feel like we’re portraying things as authentically as possible.”

“In a strange way, I had also gone through an intense training process in my own field of acting before I started playing Beth. It had already been a very intense year of me where I did Emma – had a day off – then went and worked on Last Night in Soho with Edgar Wright – had a day off – and then I did this [The Queen’s Gambit]. So I literally worked [non-stop] from January to December [2019]!”

Taylor-Joy thrives on being able to disappear into her characters without relying on any “method” or professional training. This may well be what accounts for the stunning naturalism of her work, though the actress herself is at a loss to explain how she gets there.

“There’s something about being in sync with the character where the magic just happens. I don’t understand [this process], but I’m very grateful for it. I’m learning to figure out that every character is different and that [you come to feel that] every character is meant for you and you’re meant for [them]. There is something magical that happens.”

Such total immersion does have its downside, however, in that she, like many actors, are obliged to live in a professional bubble and often find themselves disconnected from family and friends for lengthy periods.

“The problem with working back-to-back-to-back like that is not just the fact that every film tends to leave you exhausted, it’s also that I had to immediately jump into another character without having had the chance to slip back into my own life and world in between,” sighs Taylor-Joy.

Fortunately, her workaholic ways have paid off handsomely. As a result of the massive popularity of Queen’s Gambit and the attention it has brought her, Taylor-Joy was signed to a seven-figure contract to play Furiosa, the eponymous lead character in the upcoming Mad Max prequel, opposite Chris Hemsworth as Dementus. Taylor-Joy will be taking over the role that Charlize Theron played in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie that revived the 1970s action franchise. 

The prospect of playing in a blockbuster action movie excites the rising Hollywood star: “I’ve never wanted to do anything halfway and I have been looking forward to a role like this for my whole life. So yes, I will be doing as much as I can physically do.”

Meanwhile, Taylor-Joy is currently filming in Los Angeles with Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) in a period piece (as yet untitled) that has her playing a lead role alongside some of the film industry’s biggest stars – Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek and Christian Bale. The high profile project is merely one more stepping stone for the supremely gifted and ambitious Taylor-Joy. She is very much aware that this is a defining moment in her life and career. Though she has been linked romantically for the past year to London-based photographer Ben Seed, it is clear that work is her overriding priority.

“The thing is that it’s hard to turn down work when you’ve been wanting to get to a certain point in your career and suddenly you’re getting all these offers,” she says finally.

“To be honest, I’m a very intense individual, I never live in the middle. I have literally been growing up on these sets with these characters, learning so much. Don’t get me wrong, I still get nervous – but I kind of know what I’m doing now.”

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