Some of us cringe at the sound of our own voices being played back on a recording — now imagine seeing your own faces on a gigantic screen, for millions to see. For Anya Taylor-Joy, it was so bad that she thought she “would never work again.”
View this post on Instagram
During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actress admitted to feeling “devastated” after watching her performance in Robert Eggers’ The Witch for the first time. The 2015 horror movie premiered globally at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim and served as Taylor-Joy’s breakthrough, but she didn’t seem to think she gave her best performance.
“Rob [Eggers] showed us the film maybe two hours before the audience screening, and I was devastated. I thought I’d never work again.”
View this post on Instagram
Well, things obviously didn’t pan out that way since Taylor-Joy went on to act in plenty of films and series. She was Casey Cooke in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass, Illyana Rasputin in The New Mutants, and she recently captured the hearts of many as the troubled but charming Beth Harmon in Netflix’s hit series The Queen’s Gambit.
In fact, she was so put off by her own performance that she cried.
“I still get shivers thinking about it. It was just the worst feeling of, ‘I have let down the people I love most in the world. I didn’t do it right’. And I’m quite verbose, I like to talk, I like to communicate. I did not talk, I just cried. I couldn’t handle seeing my face that large.”
Taylor-Joy recently reunited with Eggers to star in his new film The Northman, alongside her co-star from The Witch, Kate Dickie.
“I was in Northern Ireland, in Belfast, with Robert Eggers, filming a movie I’m very proud of called The Northman,” Taylor-Joy said when asked where she learned about all the praise for her Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit.
View this post on Instagram
She added,
“But I mean, you can’t get more different than The Northman and The Queen’s Gambit. I was isolating, alone in this apartment with nothing but my phone, and my phone was telling me information that I could not compute. And then luckily Kate came to stay with me — Kate Dickie, who plays my mum in The Witch — and every day just more information would come in, and I’d just look at her and I’d say, ‘I think it’s going well. I think people are liking the show.’”
We love you, Anya! ❤️
*Cover image via A24
Post comments (0)