Anya Taylor-Joy Says Her ‘Queen’s Gambit’ Character is Like a “Shark Circling a Fallen Seal”

Netflix’s new limited series The Queen’s Gambit is an achingly beautiful look at the demons and angels duking it out in the soul of one young chess prodigy. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Beth Harmon, the prodigy in question.

After growing up in a lowly Kentucky orphanage, Beth finds her confidence on the world stage, beating the greatest grandmasters in the world and becoming something of a starlet in chess circles. However, Beth is haunted by a constant procession of personal loss. She soothes her trauma with booze and uses tranquilizers to calm her mind. All in all, it’s a set up for disaster. And The Queen’s Gambit delves into this drama with style, substance, and a sensational star turn from Anya Taylor-Joy.

For the past few years, Anya Taylor-Joy has been dazzling audiences with a string of fabulous turns in auteur-led films. From her literally haunting film debut in Robert Eggers’ The Witch to Autumn de Wilde’s sumptuously sensual take on Jane Austen, Emma., Taylor-Joy is an actress who radiates greatness. Or at the very least, the promise of it. The Queen’s Gambit harnesses this quality in spades, letting Taylor-Joy fully inhabit the guise of genius in all its glamour, grace, strangeness, and sorrow.

Decider chatted with The Queen’s Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy earlier this month and she explained that the key to Beth came down to her physicality…something that at times echoed a “shark circling a fallen seal.” And that she would never have even been able to play Beth the way she did without the complete trust of the series’ creator, Scott Frank.

(Mild spoilers for The Queen’s Gambit ahead.)

I was so struck, throughout the whole show, by your physicality. The way Beth moves the pieces on the board, the way she moves in her day-to-day life, it seems so precise and so Beth. I’m just curious how you came up with that way of embodying her in your physicality.

ANYA TAYLOR-JOY: Thank you so much. If I’m being honest, it was an experiment. I definitely was like, “I wonder whether people are going to see this.” In my head, I just thought, “I get. to play this character from [ages] 15-21. How am I going to sell this?”

In the back of my head, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start doing these little twitchy things.” For instance, at the very beginning, she finds it so difficult to talk to people that instead of saying “Hello,” she’ll just clear her throat. That slowly gets taken away as she gets a bit more confident, or learns something else.

A lot of it was Scott Frank deciding to trust me, and being kind enough to let me test out all of these different theories. And then it just felt right. It felt easy for my brain to understand where I was if I had all of those little ticks, and those ways of walking, stuff like that. Because there were days where I was playing her at 15, 19, 20, 21 [years of age], and we were just swapping backwards and forwards. It was a good way of being like, “Okay, and I’m here now. This is the way we’re doing it.”

On that note, the scene with you and the younger Russian player, I was both howling in laughter at the way she plays him, and also just so touched by their conversation afterwards. What did you think of that whole sequence, and what it says about Beth as a character and a player?

Again, I’m so grateful that Scott let me go with that one. I went up to him right before, and I was like, “I want her to psyche him out. Because he bothers her. This is the first time that someone is younger, and it is affecting her pride on such a deep level. I want her to go big. I want it to be like a shark circling a fallen seal, or something like that.”

Then afterwards, the conversation is so telling. Because it is kind of a conversation that she’s having with herself. If you become a world champion at 16, what are you going to do afterwards? What’s your game plan? I think the kinship that she feels with him — and just how sweet he is, asking about the drive-in movies. The fact that they’ve both given up so much of their childhood to pursue this dream, to pursue this life path. There’s always something that you give up. You have to balance that cost, I think.

After all this, how good or bad of a chess player are you in real life?

[Laughs] I’m not the world’s best chess player. I am the world’s most aggressive one, though. The show definitely — the first time I played chess prior to this show, I was amazed at how much it got to me, how somebody challenging my intellect on this board bothered me deeply. I was like, “Oh, okay. I’m definitely going to be able to play this character. I’m down. This is going to be fine.”

But no, it’s nice to be able to play chess. I feel like I’ve been given this insight into a secret world that I wasn’t aware of before. Now, I have such deep appreciation for it, and deep love. All of the characters that really, really play chess, they’re just fascinating to me.

The Queen’s Gambit is now streaming on Netflix.

Watch The Queen's Gambit on Netflix