Anya Taylor-Joy doesn’t play characters as much as she inhabits them. Be it the brilliant Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit, a warlord’s right hand in Furiosa or even when she's lending her voice to Princess Peach. Now, in Apple TV’s Lucky — adapted from Marissa Stapley’s bestseller — she’s playing a woman who walks away from a multi-million-dollar heist gone wrong and reinvents herself as a con artist, switching wigs, names, and identities fast enough to stay one step ahead of the people she’s wronged and the trauma she’s running from. It’s the kind of morally slippery role critics have started calling her specialty — earning her the nickname “the cinematic chameleon.” We sat down with Taylor-Joy to talk Lucky, producing under her own banner, and her long love affair with con films.
What fascinated you the most about inhabiting a character, in Lucky, whose morality is so fluid?
I think inherently the feminist in me was a bit frustrated at seeing a lot of morally ambiguous men and not that many morally ambiguous women. I would like people to be treated as people, and I thought Lucky was a very interesting character. I fell in love with Lucky in the book, but then the more we fleshed out the world she was going to live in, the more the enigma intrigued me, and that’s sort of what I followed.
At its core, Lucky seems to be about whether we can ever truly outrun the families and histories that shape us. Did that theme spark for you personally while making the series?
Yes, in the best way — in the sense that when you’re working with a wonderful team and you all get along, you all start bringing little bits of yourself to the surface and sharing them. And then you’re all together and you’re like, “Oh, let’s analyse this,” or “Can we put this a little bit into the show?” So I think the conversations on the show were a nice way of getting to know each other better as creatives.
Did you draw upon any references, and who is your favourite onscreen con artist?
I wouldn’t say that I had any role models in mind. I definitely did some research into what it was to be a confidence man or woman. I think what attracted me to Lucky was the fact that I love con movies — they were always very slick and sexy, and George Clooney looking handsome. I adored them. But what was interesting to me about Lucky was that it gave a very different vision of what it is to be somebody that can never sit still and has to keep moving in order to survive — but also inherently take from other people. That was a side of the con that I hadn’t seen before, and that’s what I was excited to bring to life.
You also have the upcoming Lord of the Rings film. How was it getting to tell a similar story, but in a more grounded world?
It was fabulous. It was also challenging in a way that I didn’t expect. Our wonderful first unit director, Jonathan Van Tolken, when we started running through Vegas, gave me this note that was brilliant — he said, “Run worse. I want to see your arms flail. I want to know that this is not something that you do all of the time, and I want to genuinely be concerned that you’re going to get caught.” What that means is that you’re flinging yourself into things — you don’t have the protection of fluid choreography in the same way. But I always pictured Lucky as a cat being dropped into hot water consistently. She’s always just kind of off the surface, just scraping by, and I think you can feel that in the show — that she’s getting by on the skin of her teeth.
You’re also one of the executive producers on the show, and you have your own production company, LadyKiller Productions. Does this give you more control?
I think it’s a dance, much like in life. You can control certain things, but if you’re going to be surprised by the universe, you have to leave some space for the divine. You can’t plan for certain things that will work out far better than you could ever imagine. LadyKiller just allows me to be obsessed with the things that I’m obsessed with. I’m a deeply caring person, and I care about every aspect of how you make something. I’m not just interested in why it works, but how it works — and I think that’s where I really enjoy it, because if I’m part of all of those discussions, then I get to show up and completely relinquish control, because I’ve done the preparation beforehand.
Lastly, if you were to organize a heist, which present or previous co-stars would you invite on this quest?
Salma Hayek — for everything.