Women of the Year 2022 Actress: Anya Taylor-Joy

With her unwavering commitment to creativity, this mesmerising and multifaceted star now has Hollywood and the fashion world at her feet

Anya Taylor-Joy is still on a high from Bazaar’s photoshoot when we speak a few weeks later over Zoom. “We had a genuine ball,” she enthuses. “That horse is my new obsession. I fell in love with him the second we locked eyes across the paddock – I was like, ‘Hello! We’re gonna be friends for life’.”

It’s 8am in Sydney, where Anya is filming the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa. She went to bed at midnight the previous evening, having been on set the entire day, and says that her alarm goes off between 1.45 and 5 most mornings to accommodate the punishing production schedule. “So I’m slightly in a different realm right now,” she confesses. “I’m definitely pushing my body to a new limit…”

Fresh-faced in a plain black T-shirt, her blonde hair down to her waist, she doesn’t look like someone who has spent the past few months mostly covered in dirt and gore (her make-up for Furiosa is, she says gleefully, the “juiciest and bloodiest” of any she has ever worn). Transformation is, of course, what Anya does best: she moves seamlessly from role to role, kitted out in Regency dress one month and Sixties garb the next, then equally comfortable wearing rags befitting a Mad Max dystopia. By her own admission, she feels more at ease in character than she does when asked to “be herself “, which is why – despite being unfailingly polite and friendly throughout our conversation – she still finds interviews an unnatural experience.

“I think I struggle with the idea of people being interested in me as a person, because that’s not what I put out there,” she says, adding that she had to be “talked into” getting social media. She felt similarly anxious about going on the red carpet in the early years of her success, before realising the solution was to view each appearance as a fresh performance challenge. “If I make it about myself, that’s when I start to panic, whereas if it’s an art form, it’s so much easier,” she explains. “I’m lucky enough to work with people who are as obsessively creative as I am, and we build whole narratives together. That makes it fun, because I’m an artist, and making art is all I want to do.”

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