The morning after the LA premiere of The Northman, Anya Taylor-Joy got on the phone with Weekend Watchlist host Mia Vicino for a chat about recent comfort watches, fabulous vampire nails, and sitting out The Queen’s Gambit insanity in the Northern Irish countryside.
A world without Anya Taylor-Joy on our screens seems a distant memory, but there was a time back in 2014—before Thoroughbreds, before Emma., before Last Night in Soho—when we had to squint for a glimpse of her. Appearances began around 2014: a tiny role in Vampire Academy, a TV movie called Viking Quest. Then Robert Eggers’ debut feature, The Witch, tore through Sundance, TIFF and Fantastic Fest in 2015, and some Letterboxd reviewers took notice of one particular actress.
“Anya Taylor-Joy is luminescent as the teenage daughter of the family,” wrote Paul. “Newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy absolutely knocks it out of the park as the eldest child Thomasin who is the lead but also seems to take the brunt of the verbal and emotional abuse from her confused and paranoid parents,” agreed DJ Kento.
While The Witch captured Taylor-Joy’s potential, it was chess-addiction drama The Queen’s Gambit, sliding onto Netflix in the thick of shelter-at-home orders during 2020 and becoming one of the highest-rated narrative miniseries on Letterboxd that year, that sent her profile stratospheric.
The attention would be a lot for any young artist to navigate. Fortunately for Taylor-Joy, she was at that very moment isolating in Northern Ireland, back in the creative arms of Eggers and their film family, mostly oblivious to the frenzy as they filmed the $90-million Viking epic, The Northman. In it, Taylor-Joy plays Olga of the Birch Forest, the Ophelia to Alexander Skarsgård’s Hamlet-inspiration, Amleth. The cast also includes Eggers repeat-performers Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe, along with Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang and Björk—the ideal isolation bubble.
In a film that understandably favors Skarsgård and his traps, Letterboxd members once again have things to say about Taylor-Joy, with Jake writing that she is “perplexingly good in her role as Olga, a Slavic slave with supernatural powers”, to which, says Lewis, “she brings her usual much welcomed energy”, while Ana thinks that “Anya Taylor-Joy and Alexander Skarsgård are one of the on-screen couples with the best chemistry I’ve ever seen.”
The morning after Taylor-Joy reunited with her isolation buddies, I jumped on a phone call with her to find out more about her relationship to Olga, her comfort watchlist, and whether we might see our Letterboxd fave in a screwball rom-com anytime soon. (You can listen to excerpts of this interview on this episode of Weekend Watchlist.)
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk this morning, especially because The Northman LA premiere was last night. How was that?
Anya Taylor-Joy: It was so nice to be with everyone again. It’s always kind of strange because you haven’t seen each other in a while, and then the first time you get to hug is in front of a whole bunch of people taking your pictures. But getting the opportunity to sit through the film with everyone and then hang out afterwards is just so special. I really have a lot of love for this cast and this crew.
Oh, that’s awesome. So before we get into The Northman I want to get to know your taste in movies a little bit, because Letterboxd is all about discovering and appreciating films, new and old. So what are some foundational films for you?
Oh, gosh.
I know. Huge question. Huge question.
Massive question. I’ll talk about the films that I’ve been leaning on recently. Almost Famous, always. I just love that film. I remember seeing it for the first time and I thought the way that they captured tone was really quite singular. I’ll put on Arrival if I’m feeling very depressed about the state of the world. I love that film. I think its message is incredible and then… So this is not answering your question at all! These are not foundational movies for me, but they are random things that I’m really enjoying at the moment. I’d forgotten how amazing Interview with the Vampire is. It’s so great. It’s so campy. It’s so fabulous. The manicures on Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are just out of this world.
That movie’s so fun, and I’ve seen it a bunch of times.
It’s so much fun to watch. I cannot believe I have never dressed up as Lestat for Hallowe’en. I’m completely shocked that I missed that opportunity. That’s the next plan.
I’ve also heard that you like ’30s and ’40s screwball rom-coms, like Bringing Up Baby.
Love that. Yeah, completely. I think it’s when I feel… I’m a creative, I have a lot of feelings. And whenever I need comforting I tend to go for those kinds of movies. I go for movies in the ’30s and ’40s. And music-wise, I go for kind of, like, ’50s music. That’s what self-soothes me, essentially.
I do the same thing with screwball rom-coms. They’re very soothing. Would you ever want to do one?
Oh, I would love to. Whenever I think about what I do next, I just want to be put in situations I haven’t been put in before, because I think that’s the way that you grow as a creative—never staying in a comfortable spot. I think being comfortable in that way is kind of the death of creativity. So, I would love to do something like that. I think it would be a little bit shocking for people, hopefully in a good way.
Let’s get to The Northman, which is kind of the inverse of a screwball rom-com—like a hate tragedy. In the film, you’re Olga of the Birch Forest, a Slavic sorceress who Amleth meets on a slave ship. You’re an avid reader also, and I was just curious, because I’m also an avid reader, if you read anything in particular to prepare for your role. And what were you reading on set to get into character?
I was not reading on set to get into character. I was reading to survive. I read a lot on that movie because when we set off to Northern Ireland, we all set out thinking, ‘Okay, we’re one of the first films to be shooting during Covid. We can’t go home. We’re going to isolate. This is what it is.’ So, I brought four pairs of sweatpants and two giant suitcases filled with books. I was like, ‘Right. Okay. No matter what happens, I’m going to be fine.’
But it’s interesting because I do usually like to read and educate myself. But Rob is one of those few people who I would rather he tell me the story than I read the story for myself. Especially when working on a film of his, because the details that he will put emphasis on, you naturally know that’s something important to the film. And we both are such big history buffs and we get so nerdily excited about the world that we’re creating that it’s just fun to be in that back-and-forth conversation of, “Hey, I just discovered this.” “No, no, no. I just discovered this. Did you know that it was actually this way and blah, blah, blah?” And that’s a really wonderful environment to be a part of.
What I found really fascinating about Olga and her character is the way that she acts as a foil to Amleth’s hyper-masculinity. There’s that line, “He has the strength to break men’s bones, but you have the cunning to break their minds,” which is a totally awesome line, one of my favorites of the film.
Thank you.
I was wondering if you could speak more about Olga’s cunning and her role in balancing that brutality with tenderness.
I think something that’s really nice about how we’re presenting these two characters, but also masculinity and femininity as a whole in this film, is there’s a great amount of respect for both in terms of what they can bring to the table. I don’t think that there’s any moment that Amleth looks at Olga and thinks, ‘Oh, dead weight, because she is five times smaller than me’. There’s not a single moment where he does that. He’s always kind of looking at her, thinking, ‘Okay, this is really helpful’, or, ‘I’m in awe of what she’s doing right now’. And it kind of works vice versa.
So, I think it’s nice just to be part of a team where both of them are pulling together to make this work. You see them working together first for their shared goals, second for their love that develops over the course of time. It’s nice to not just be thrown around and violated essentially in a movie like this, which I think it could be quite easy to make the female roles that.
You’ve played a wide variety of characters, and you clearly have a lot of love and passion for each one. I was curious about what Olga means to you personally. What will you remember most about her? What will you take with you?
Honestly, a gratitude, a real gratitude. Because it’s interesting: sometimes what happens is when you’re doing it, you’re aware of the significance it will have in your own personal life or the lesson that it is that you’re learning through your character. Sometimes it happens in hindsight. In hindsight, I just think, ‘Wow, to have gone from being in quarantine inside, to then playing a sorceress of nature, constantly outside, constantly in the elements.’
And then The Queen’s Gambit came out when I was on this film, and I was spared a whole bunch of things that would’ve been incredibly overwhelming, had I not just been on the side of the mountain, in my bare feet, trying to survive, with the world changing on my phone, but not changing in my day to day.
I feel very lucky that I have the time to acclimatize, and that I acclimatized in ways that are genuinely helpful to me, which is nature, reading, being around my original film family, and being stuck into working on something that felt so epic, but also requires you to have no ego. Those are my favorite films. I don’t necessarily believe in... of course, everyone has a title on set, but I really do not believe in set hierarchy. I believe that we’re all creatives working towards a common goal, and being with that crew in Northern Ireland was just everything to me.
Well, thank you so much again, Anya. Thank you so much for taking this time.
Thank you so much. And thank you for pronouncing my name correctly. I really appreciate it. It’s not the easiest thing for people to do. So, thanks.
Well, I remember there’s this one video of you saying “Anya” like “aneurysm”.
If you have any other options, please let me know. But I find that this is the one that sticks in people’s brains.
I mean, it does. That’s how I remembered. It’s perfect. So thank you.
Thank you.
‘The Northman’ is in cinemas now via Focus Features.
