Reacting to ANYA TAYLOR -JOY - Downtown | last night in Soho | Tune

Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy (/ˈænjə/ ANN-yə; born 16 April 1996) is an actress[a] best known for her role as Beth Harmon in the Netflix limited series The Queen's Gambit (2020). She has won several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award. In 2021, she was featured on Time magazine's 100 Next list of "emerging leaders who are shaping the future". Born in Miami and raised in Buenos Aires and London, Taylor-Joy left school at the age of 16 to pursue an acting career. After small television roles, she made her film debut with a leading role in the horror film The Witch (2015), before starring in the horror film Split (2016) and its sequel, Glass (2019), and the black comedy Thoroughbreds (2017). She won the Trophée Chopard at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Taylor-Joy has since appeared in the fifth and sixth series of the television drama Peaky Blinders (2019–2022), and played Emma Woodhouse in the period drama Emma (2020), which gained her a Golden Globe nomination. The same year, she received critical acclaim for her performance starring as Beth Harmon in the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit (2020), winning several awards, including a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award. Taylor-Joy was born on 16 April 1996 in Miami, Florida, to Dennis Alan Taylor, OBE, a former banker, and Jennifer Marina Joy, a psychologist. She has stated that her birth in Miami was a "fluke", since her parents had been holidaying in the city at the time; because of her birthplace, she holds American citizenship due to the country's jus soli nationality law.[5] 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 is the youngest of six siblings, four of whom are from her father's earlier 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 refused to learn English in hopes of moving back to Argentina.[13] She attended Hill House International Junior School and Queen's Gate School, acting in school productions. She left school at the age of 16, citing bullying from her fellow pupils as the reason; she recalled: Argentina is all green and I had horses and animals everywhere. All of a sudden I was in a big city and didn't speak the language. 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. I spent a lot of time in school crying in bathrooms.
Taylor-Joy initially trained in dance, studying ballet until the age of 15. Aged 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 was her 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 running errands for the crew and reciting the Seamus Heaney poem "Digging" for a forthcoming screentest. He later introduced her to his agent, with whom she signed as an actor.