Actress Anya Taylor-Joy has starred in numerous movies and television shows since she first made her acting debut in 2015's The Witch. The period horror movie centers on a Puritan family who encounter evil spirits in the woods near their New England farm. Taylor-Joy was was critically recognized for her performance in the movie, and won accolades including Best Female Newcomer at the Empire Awards, Best Actress at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, Breakthrough Actor at the Gotham Awards, and Best Youth Performance at the Seattle Film Critics Society, among others.
Following her debut in The Witch, Taylor-Joy stuck around the horror genre. In 2016, she starred in Morgan, a science fiction horror film, in the title role of an artificial being. Taylor-Joy also played Barack Obama’s friend Charlotte Baughman in Barry, a drama about the former president's time at Columbia University and starred as Casey Cooke in Split, a psychological horror thriller centering on a man (James McAvoy) with 24 different personalities. Taylor-Joy went on to reprise her role as Casey in the horror movie's sequel, Glass, in 2019.
Related: The Witch's Black Phillip Almost Killed One Of The Movie's Actors
In between those movies, Taylor-Joy starred in the Spanish psychological horror mystery film Marrowbone and the American dark comedy thriller Thoroughbreds, both in 2017. The following year, she would step away from darker roles to be part of the animated children’s movie Playmobil: The Movie as well as the British biographical film Radioactive, which starred Rosamund Pike as physicist and chemist Marie Curie. And earlier this year, Taylor-Joy took on the role of Emma Woodhouse in Emma, based on the Jane Austen novel of the same name, and was lauded for her exceptional performance as the matchmaking title character.
What Anya Taylor-Joy Has Done Since The Witch
Aside from film, Taylor-Joy has also seen success in the television world, most notably in the starring role of Nella Brandt in the BBC miniseries The Miniaturist in 2017 and in the recurring role of Gina Gray in a six-episode arc of the British period crime drama Peaky Blinders in 2019. Also in 2019, she voiced Brea in ten episodes of the animated web television series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.
In 2020, Anya Taylor-Joy will return to the horror genre that she first entered with The Witch, starring in the highly anticipated superhero horror film The New Mutants, an installment of the X-Men film franchise based on the Marvel Comics team of the same name. Taylor-Joy will star alongside Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones), Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things), Alice Braga, Blu Hunt, and Henry Zaga. The movie, which was one of many that saw its release date postponed due to COVID-19, is set to come out later this summer, with Taylor-Joy playing Illyana Rasputin, or “Magik”, a Russian mutant with sorcery powers. In 2021, Taylor-Joy will continue to demonstrate her prowess in the genre with the scheduled release of the psychological horror film Last Night in Soho.
