Anya Taylor-Joy / Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy

Born on April 16, 1996 (Miami, Florida, United States).

Anya Taylor-Joy seems born for the moment when an ordinary world gives way to something stranger. With her unmistakable gaze, precise movements, and a voice that can sound both fragile and quietly commanding, she makes the uncanny feel intensely human. Raised between Argentina and Britain after her birth in Miami, she carries something of both worlds into her performances: an outsider’s alertness, a dancer’s discipline, and the unsettling calm of someone who has already seen what lies beyond the door. In The Witch (2015), her Thomasin stood at the edge of faith, fear, and freedom; in Split (2017) and Glass (2019), Casey Cooke survived a nightmare through perception and resolve rather than brute force. And as Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit (2020), she transformed the apparently ordinary chessboard into a battlefield of obsession, isolation, and hard-won independence.

One of her earliest and most revealing encounters with that boundary came in Morgan (2016). As a bioengineered young woman learning what it means to be alive, Taylor-Joy found an unusually tender counterpart in Rose Leslie, who played Dr. Amy Menser — the behavioral specialist who cared for Morgan as a person rather than a laboratory creation. Their bond gives the thriller its fragile human center: a story about the need to be loved, and the danger of being denied the freedom to exist.

Her characters rarely accept the roles their worlds assign them. In Last Night in Soho (2021), she became a luminous figure trapped in a seductive and terrible vision of the past. In The Northman (2022), she brought an almost supernatural intelligence to a brutal saga of revenge; in The Menu (2022), she was the outsider who refused to follow the script of an exquisitely staged nightmare. Then came Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024): a largely wordless, ferocious performance that carried the younger incarnation of the warrior made legendary by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). They never played opposite each other, but their shared heroine forms a rare cinematic inheritance — two utterly different women giving the same myth its past and its future.

Those roles also place Taylor-Joy in a curious constellation of collaborators. Nicholas Hoult, her uneasy companion in The Menu, connects her to Jennifer Lawrence, Kristen Stewart, Teresa Palmer, and Theron. Chris Hemsworth, her formidable adversary in Furiosa, belongs to the screen worlds of Emily Blunt, Stewart, Theron, and Scarlett Johansson. The same network reaches Chris Evans through Sacrifice (2026), where she plays a charismatic cult leader opposite his captive movie star, giving her a further connection to Johansson and Ana de Armas. In Peaky Blinders, Taylor-Joy brought another kind of danger to Gina Gray; in Dune: Part Two (2024), her brief appearance as Alia Atreides opened a new path toward the universe of Rebecca Ferguson. Both are in the announced cast of Dune: Part Three (2026), a connection best treated as forthcoming until the film reaches audiences.

She is equally capable of finding an unexpected pulse inside spectacle. In Sacrifice, a tale of apocalyptic conviction and the performance of power, she turned another apparent savior into something far more troubling. As Drasa in The Gorge (2025), she combined the precision of a marksman with an almost disarming emotional openness. Her Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) adds a playful voice-acting dimension. And in Lucky (2026), she became both the star and an executive producer through her LadyKiller banner, helping shape a story about a woman trying to escape a criminal past that refuses to release her. Her career increasingly suggests an actress interested not merely in entering strange worlds, but in having a hand in building them.

Off-screen, she has spoken about the dislocation of growing up between languages and countries, and her public persona retains a striking mixture of glamour, eccentricity, and carefully guarded privacy. She married musician Malcolm McRae in 2022, revealing the private ceremony publicly two years later. What makes Taylor-Joy belong in this particular constellation is not beauty, fame, or an impressive collection of franchises. It is the feeling that every one of her most memorable heroines has found a crack in the world — and is deciding, with terrifying composure, whether to escape through it or break it wider.

Married. No children.