Anya Taylor-Joy’s favourite thing about her film career? Not the glamour or the millions, but getting down and dirty on sets like The Northman’s – interview
- Taylor-Joy just enthused on Instagram over filming Robert Eggers’ upcoming Viking epic – and there’s still The Menu, Succession and Furiosa to come
- Nicole Kidman recalls first meeting Taylor-Joy on a freezing, muddy set, and she got close to director M. Night Shyamalan while shooting Split
Anya Taylor-Joy posted a brief Instagram video a few weeks ago during a car ride, her hair damp, her face smeared with dirt and her smile radiant as she laughed and announced, with a hint of astonishment, “Wow … today was a very good day.” There were no words in the post’s caption, just a volcano emoji bracketed by two ice cubes.
Asked about the video, Taylor-Joy says, “That is genuinely, potentially, my happiest place,” and by “happiest place”, she does not mean Iceland, where the video was shot coming home from a recent day working on Robert Eggers’ latest movie, the Viking epic The Northman, nor does she necessarily mean a film set, though she will proclaim repeatedly and without prompting during a lengthy recent video conversation that she feels more at home working than she does at home or anywhere else.
Specifically, precisely, what Taylor-Joy wants to communicate is that her happiest place on earth is a film set where she’s covered in grime and, with any luck, some kind of prosthetic blood, and where someone is challenging her to do something that’s physically hard so she can ignite the competitive spirit within herself and see how much she can endure. And that particular day in Iceland checked all those boxes, with the bonus of getting to swim around in the freezing North Atlantic. A very good day, indeed.
‘Are you running toward something or running away from something? Which one is it?’ I think I’m running toward something
But this is a young woman who likes to get dirty, so much so that when she was making the new David O. Russell film earlier this year, and she met the man who created her favourite brand of fake blood, who revealed this fact as he was applying the fake blood to her body, well, she just lost her mind. “I live in your blood! It’s my favourite kind of blood! Thank you thank you thank you!”
“I thought, ‘Who’s that girl?’” Kidman remembers. “Then I take another look and, ‘Oh, that’s Anya!’ She’s in the mud, dressed in nothing, it’s freezing cold and the wind’s whipping around, and it was like meeting a kindred spirit. This is my kind of girl!”
