Anya Taylor-Joy Grateful for 'Difficult' Childhood: 'Now I Look at It With So Much Love'

Growing up in Buenos Aires for six years before moving to London made for a tough childhood, actress Anya Taylor-Joy said in a new interview.

It “was difficult for little me,” The Queen’s Gambit star, 30, told L’Officiel in an interview published Thursday, June 4. “But now I look at it with so much love, because I just think it perfectly set me up to live this kind of transient life.”

She now lives between London and Los Angeles with actor husband Malcolm McRae, whom she wed in 2022.

“I’ve always been nomadic by nature,” Taylor-Joy told the outlet. “Now I’ve just fully embraced it as part of who I am. If I have a couple of days off, I’m always like, Ooh, what’s within driving distance? If it’s six hours or less, I’m like, Let’s go. Why not?”

Taylor-Joy will next appear in Apple TV+ crime drama Lucky, which begins streaming Wednesday, July 15. She plays the title character, who is on the run from the FBI and Mob.

“I was so attracted to playing somebody who was just so desperate to stay still and put down roots and form some kind of attachment where she didn’t feel like the ground was going to fall away from underneath her,” she said.

Taylor-Joy continued, “I think there’s been such a glorification of the hustle and the con, where we see it as very slick and jazzy and s---. I was intrigued by the idea of, ‘What is this actually like if you can’t form any attachments to anybody? If you can’t even give people your real name, how does that feel?’”

Between Lucky, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Dune: Part Two and Dune: Part Three, the actress often finds herself in the desert.

“It always makes me laugh, because I have no idea what it is about my hair, my skin tone, or the largeness of my eyes that makes anyone think I’m suited to be a desert creature — but people love to put me there, and I do feel a real affinity for it,” Taylor-Joy said. “[Dune director] Denis [Villeneuve] and I talked about this a lot: There’s a sacredness to the desert. There’s something quite extraordinary about a place that is so seemingly desolate and barren, and there’s such a starkness to putting people there.”

She considers her favorite thing about being in the desert to be “sunrise or sunset.”

“You see the most extraordinary colors—and you just feel like you’re the only person in the world,” she explained.

After dropping out of high school at 16, Taylor-Joy’s fame began after she played the lead in the 2015 dark fantasy The Witch and continued with 2020 Netflix period drama The Queen’s Gambit.

She compared getting into character to being “like I get a roommate for a time, if that doesn’t make me sound too crazy,” she said with a laugh. “But you spend 14 to 16 hours a day being them, thinking the way that they think, and making the choices that they make — and there can’t be any judgment. It just can’t exist. So you have to just fully commit to whatever it is that they’re doing.”