Queen of the Screen

Queen of the Screen

Anya Taylor-Joy doesn't consider herself to be a particularly competitive person...at least, not with other people. "I can be very, very hard on myself," she says from a sun-drenched hotel room in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she's been camped out since August filming Robert Eggers' The Northman. She pauses to note the "miraculous" amount of light pouring in through the window, laughs, apologizes for interrupting herself, and then returns to her point: that she is perhaps her own greatest adversary.

"I think I learned how to be more gentle through Beth," Taylor-Joy says, referring to Elizabeth Harmon, the chess prodigy she portrays in Netflix's magnificent new drama The Queen's Gambit. "The thing I connected [with] a lot was when you have that sort-of single-minded determination and you have a gift with it, you do tend to be isolated from the herd. And when you are just alone with yourself for intense periods of time...that level of pushing yourself can start to mess with you a bit."

Beth and Taylor-Joy may as well be two sides of the same coin (or, perhaps, two sides of a chess board). In the Scott Frank–directed limited series, Beth routinely and almost absent-mindedly dazzles the people in her orbit, often gobsmacked older men, with her unmatched cleverness and unwavering resolve for success. Meanwhile, Taylor-Joy's own steadfast work ethic and shrewd talents have led to her swift and spectacular rise in the industry.

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