Anya Taylor-Joy

She next starred in the drama film Barry, which focused on a young Barack Obama during his first year at Columbia University in 1981; it premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.

The same year, Taylor-Joy's likeness was licensed from Storm Management to represent the character of Valkyrie Cain on the tenth anniversary book cover of Skulduggery Pleasant, and subsequently the covers of the seventh, eighth, ninth, and fourteenth books in the series, before she appeared in the music video for Skrillex's remix of GTA's song "Red Lips".

Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy (born 16 April 1996) is an actress.

She has won several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Film Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.

Born in Miami and raised in Buenos Aires and London, Taylor-Joy left school at the age of 16 to pursue an acting career.

Taylor-Joy was born on 16 April 1996 in Miami, Florida, to Dennis Alan Taylor, a former banker, and Jennifer Marina Joy, a psychologist.

Her father is an Argentine of English and Scottish descent, the son of a British father and an Anglo-Argentine mother.

Her mother was born in Zambia to an English diplomat father, David Joy, and a Spanish mother from Barcelona.

She has stated that her birth in Miami was a "fluke", since her parents had been vacationing in the city at the time; because of her birthplace, she holds American citizenship due to the country's jus soli nationality law.

She is the youngest of six siblings, four of whom are from her father's previous marriage.

Taylor-Joy lived with her family in Buenos Aires and attended Northlands School until the age of six, when the family relocated to the Victoria area of London.

She is fluent in both Spanish and English.

Taylor-Joy experienced the move as "traumatic" and initially refused to learn English in hopes of moving back to Argentina.

She attended Hill House International Junior School and Queen's Gate School, acting in school productions.

She struggled socially at school, recalling:"I didn't really feel like I fit in anywhere. I was too English to be Argentine, too Argentine to be English, too American to be anything ... The kids just didn't understand me in any shape or form ... I used to get locked in lockers."

Taylor-Joy initially trained in dance, studying ballet until the age of 15.

At age 17, she was scouted as a model by Storm Management founder Sarah Doukas, while walking her dog outside Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, London.

She signed with the agency on the condition that acting remain her first passion and pursuit.

During a modelling shoot promoting the television series Downton Abbey, which she had almost rejected because she was studying for her GCSE examinations, Taylor-Joy was noticed by the Downton Abbey actor Allen Leech while running errands for the crew and while reciting the Séamus Heaney poem "Digging" for a forthcoming screentest.

He later introduced her to his agent, with whom she signed as an actress.

Taylor-Joy was removed from the final cut of her first acting role as a background 'Feeder Girl' in the 2014 fantasy comedy-horror Vampire Academy, with her role left uncredited.

After portraying small television roles, she found success through the lead role in the acclaimed horror film The Witch (2015).

She made her television debut as Philippa Collins-Davidson in an episode of the detective drama series Endeavour, followed by a multi-episode arc in the 2015 fantasy-adventure drama series Atlantis.

That same year, she starred in The Witch, a period horror film directed by Robert Eggers, which tells the story of a Puritan family that encounters forces of evil in the woods beyond their New England farm.

It premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.

The role was her breakthrough.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker called Taylor-Joy "remarkable in the role, her wide-eyed innocence entwined with a thread of cunning—proof either of her quick wits, scarcely unusual in a clever and curious girl, or of some fell purpose."

She won the Gotham Independent Film Award for Breakthrough Actor and the Empire Award for Best Female Newcomer.

The following year, Taylor-Joy starred in Luke Scott's science fiction horror film Morgan, playing the title character.

It received negative reviews and was a commercial failure, but Booth Michigan's John Serba wrote that "Taylor-Joy disarms us with a performance that keenly teeter-totters between little-girl innocent and dead-eyed viciousness."

Taylor-Joy starred in the horror film Split (2016), its sequel Glass (2019), and the black comedy Thoroughbreds (2017), and won the Trophée Chopard at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

In 2016, she was cast opposite James McAvoy in M. Night Shyamalan's Split, where she played Casey Cooke, a teenage girl abducted by a man with multiple personalities (McAvoy).

It was a commercial success, grossing $278.5 million on a budget of $9 million.

Her next film that year was Cory Finley's directorial debut Thoroughbreds.

It co-starred Olivia Cooke and Anton Yelchin in his final film role.

Taylor-Joy played Lily, a high-school student who schemes to kill her stepfather via a contract with a drug dealer.

It premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival; David Ehrlich of IndieWire called her performance "captivating".

Taylor-Joy appeared in the fifth and sixth seasons of the television crime drama Peaky Blinders (2019–2022), and played Emma Woodhouse in the period drama Emma (2020), which gained her a Golden Globe nomination.

In 2020, she received acclaim and international recognition for her performance as chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit, winning a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as receiving a nomination for a Primetime Emmy.

Taylor-Joy has since starred in the films Last Night in Soho (2021), The Northman (2022), The Menu (2022), and The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023).