Anya Taylor Joy Thought She Would Never Work Again After The Witch

Many celebrities despise watching themselves on the big screen, and actress Anya Taylor Joy is one of those celebrities.

When she first saw her performance in Robert Eggers’ The Witch when it premiered at Sundance in 2015, she told THR: “I thought I’d never work again. I still get shivers thinking about it,” she says. “It was just the worst feeling of, ‘I have let down the people I love most in the world. I didn’t do it right’ Adiend, I’m quite verbose, I like to talk, I like to communicate. I did not talk. I just cried. I couldn’t handle seeing my face that large.”

Her performance had the opposite effect. Not only did her first film role catapult her to A-list status, but she went on to win a Golden Globe for her stellar work in Netflix’s limited series The Queen’s Gambit. Currently, the actress is nominated for an Emmy for the same performance.

Taylor-Joy heard about all the praise the show was getting while on the set of Eggers’ new film The Northman, where she reunited with Witch co-star Kate Dickie. “I was isolating [in Northern Ireland], alone in this apartment with nothing but my phone, and my phone was telling me information that I could not compute. And then luckily, Kate came to stay with me — Kate Dickie, who plays my mom in ‘The Witch’ — and every day just more information would come in, and I’d just look at her, and I’d say, ‘I think it’s going well. I think people are liking the show.’”

Outside of The Queen’s Gambit, she’s starred in films from all genres such as Jane Austen drama Emma, superhero action film New Mutants, and horror film Split. Joy is soon to start production on George Miller’s Mad Max spin-off prequel Furiosa.

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