Anya Taylor-Joy does not do things by halves. She recently pulled together a 200-person 30th birthday party in two days, partied into the following afternoon, slept for two hours, went to Coachella, then packed a bag and drove across America. That appetite for intensity is the through-line of her career, and it runs straight through her latest project.
She stars in Lucky, a seven-episode Apple TV+ thriller, playing a woman on the run from Las Vegas to Big Sur after a 10-million-dollar heist goes wrong. The role suits her natural speed, but this time she was also behind it: she co-produced the series through Lady Killer, the production company she set up in 2024, after Reese Witherspoon sent her the Marissa Stapley novel it is based on and asked if she wanted in.
Producing taught her a different muscle. “I learnt that being a leader is about being unflappable,” she said. “It’s not your job to freak out, it’s your job to find solutions and soothe everybody else.” She built the cast around people she trusted, bringing in Annette Bening, Timothy Olyphant, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Drew Starkey, along with her stunt double from Furiosa.
The rest of her schedule is just as full. She returns as Alia Atreides in the next Dune film later this year alongside Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet, has joined The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, and is developing Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family into a Netflix series. Somewhere in there she is a Dior ambassador and a self-described incessant reader who travels with around 20 physical books.
What keeps it from tipping into chaos is a clear sense of what she is chasing. “There’s a fire that starts up in me when I realise something is going to be tough,” she said. “I love to be in situations where others would be miserable and make them places full of joy.” As a child, she told her mother “the middle is death.” Two decades on, she has built a career out of avoiding it.
