Anya Taylor Joy: I have a reputation for fighting for feminine rage
Anya Taylor Joy is a funny, interesting person but she really never spills the tea in her interviews. It’s sort of impressive, how she keeps it about work 90% of the time, and whenever some personal stuff spills out, it’s like “I adore my husband” or “I keep weird props in my home.” So it is with Anya’s British GQ cover profile. She’s promoting Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and the most interesting part of the interview is where she’s talking about how she fights to bring female rage to the screen. Some highlights:
The throughline of her work is defiance: “As a survival mechanism you learn to be self-effacing and self-deprecating. You bury yourself before anybody else does. What I’m coming to understand is: as long as you’re not causing anyone else harm, you have to stand your ground.”
Fighting for feminine rage: “How do I say this? I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for fighting for feminine rage, which is a strange thing, because I’m not promoting violence – but I am promoting women being seen as people. We have reactions that are not always dainty or unmessy.”
What she suggested for ‘The Menu’: In The Menu, the 2022 dark comedy that skewers the pretensions of wealthy gourmands, Taylor-Joy’s character discovers that her date has intentionally brought her to the film’s restaurant setting to die. It was scripted that her character would respond with a single tear rolling down her cheek. “What planet are we living on? I was like, ‘Let me explain to you: I am going to leap across the table and try and literally kill him with my bare hands,’” she says, adding that director Mark Mylod and co-star Nicholas Hoult were thankfully very game.
She rarely wears her contacts: Taylor-Joy herself doesn’t see the eyes seeing her, because she almost never wears her contact lenses; the slight fuzzing of her vision allows her to zone out from the intensity of being watched.
She’s not an angry person: “For all my championing of female rage, I’ve never been an angry person. For a long time the only time I ever got angry was on other people’s behalfs. I’ve always internalised this thing of ‘I’ve done something wrong. If you treat me badly, it’s because I am the problem.’ And I’m so grateful for Furiosa, because there was a real moment where I started getting angry for myself. My husband was like ‘I’ve never heard you be like this.’ I was like, ‘I’m glad! I’m glad that I’m angry!’ If someone steps on me now I’m like, ‘Hey, f–k you!’ That makes me feel good.”
I love this? I love the artistic exploration of feminine rage, and I love justified feminine rage in life. There’s a lot to be enraged about, if you’re a woman. I see and experience bullsh-t which brings out my feminine rage on a daily basis. Anya’s not saying – and I’m not saying – that it’s okay to be violent or to have aggro reactions to everything, but more women should just get mad and say “f–k off, I’m not taking your bullsh-t.”
Also: if you need contacts, I cannot imagine just going around, never wearing them? I would bump into things constantly.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, cover courtesy of British GQ.
Anya Taylor-Joy is seen at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Where: New York, New York, United States When: 22 May 2024 Credit: BauerGriffin/INSTARimages 
Anya Taylor-Joy is seen at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Where: New York, New York, United States When: 22 May 2024 Credit: BauerGriffin/INSTARimagesncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pLHLnpmirJOdxm%2BvzqZmcW9jZoR6e8CnsJqXpJbGrbvRmKGosY%2BerKmt1Z6Wmpeimr22wMCtoKimj5u8s6vFop6hrJmjtKCyzquWn52dnruqusSYqZqflWQ%3D