For six months, Anya Taylor-Joy was not allowed to breathe.

On the Australian set of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, director George Miller delivered the same edict daily, with the patience and conviction of someone who has made exactly the movies he wanted to make his entire career: Don’t breathe. Close your mouth. Show no emotion. He wanted an icon, and icons, in his view, do not fidget.

Taylor-Joy, 29, can do many things. But staying put is not one of them.

In fact, her latest project — Lucky, a propulsive Apple TV crime thriller premiering July 15 — has her on the run for nearly the entire length of its seven episodes: sprinting, scrambling, tumbling, never stopping. It is, in ways both obvious and not, the most personal project of her career.

At this particular moment, though, she is seemingly content to linger, eating a bowl of berries on the sun-dappled terrace of a West Hollywood restaurant while recalling that cursed director’s note — don’t breathe, close your mouth, show no emotion — like someone who has processed something genuinely difficult and come out the other side with her humor intact.

On billboards around L.A., she is the otherworldly face of Dior and Tiffany. Seated just a few inches away, however, she feels entirely approachable, like an old friend meeting you for breakfast. But every so often, the light catches her a certain way, or she turns her head and simply holds still, and her face reassembles the ones you know: chess master Beth Harmon. Furiosa. The girl from The Witch who gets on suspiciously well with an evil black goat. Also, somehow, Princess Peach.

This year, Taylor-Joy has three major projects pulling her in opposite directions. Lucky is the first time she has the producing title to match the collaborative instincts she’s had since her first film, followed by Dune: Part Three, the conclusion of Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction opus. Then she’ll take a trip to Middle-earth. One is intimate, kinetic, entirely hers. The other two are the biggest movie franchises on the planet.

Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, which is producing Lucky, had one actress in mind when they optioned the Marissa Stapley novel on which it’s based. “Anya was always Lucky,” Witherspoon says over email. “She was the first and only actress we shared the book with.” What they got in return was more than a star. “She’s a born producer,” Witherspoon continues. “She cares deeply, connects viscerally to the character.” Taylor-Joy, for her part, knew immediately why. “This is somebody who can’t sit still,” she says of her grifter character Lucky Armstrong. “And I’m somebody that loves to move.”

***

The producing credit on Lucky may be new, but the instinct to orchestrate isn’t. Taylor-Joy has spent much of her career quietly lobbying directors, arguing for characters and involving herself in decisions that extend well beyond performance. Furiosa would prove to be the most extreme test of that instinct. But first, there was Argentina.

Taylor-Joy was born in Miami — her father was working there at the time — but raised in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six children spread across nearly four decades of family. Her eldest sister is in her 60s; her nearest sibling is seven years older. She grew up feral, in the best sense. Outside constantly, obsessed with animals, collecting and hatching eggs, teaching ducklings to swim. Her father was an investment banker who retired at 40, got bored and became a world champion powerboat racer — and she rode with him, the spray and the speed and the noise a very particular high, which felt completely normal at the time. Her mother was a psychologist. The family was sprawling and warm and physical.

In 2002, her father looked at the unstable political situation in Argentina and decided his children needed to grow up somewhere safer. Taylor-Joy was 61/2 when the family relocated to London. She didn’t speak a word of English. Everything that had made her herself — the warmth, the animals, the cousins who stayed behind — was suddenly gone.

England was a shock. On her first day of school, still operating on Argentine instincts, she kissed a classmate on the cheek. At 61/2, she was immediately branded a lesbian and frozen out. The bullying that followed went straight for whatever a girl is most uncertain about. What they told her, repeatedly, was that she wasn’t beautiful.

So she found her worth somewhere else. She learned English the only way available to her — Harry Potter, cover to cover, book by book, then back to the beginning. For a girl who couldn’t go home, Hogwarts was close enough.

Her mother remembers 8-year-old Anya discovering the word “agent” and adding it to her wish list, right next to “puppy.” She googled obsessively — how did people get their start in Hollywood, what was the path, who did you have to know — and kept getting the same infuriating answer: I was in the right place at the right time.

“As an 11-year-old who’d been in one school play,” she says, “that was not helpful.”

Her break, when it came, arrived — you guessed it — while she was on the move. Albeit a little wobbly.

Taylor-Joy was 16. She had a party the next day and had never worn heels before. She wanted to practice, so she put on a pair and took her dog for a walk. A car began to slow alongside her. She walked faster. The car kept pace. She picked up the dog and ran. A man leaned out the window and said: “If you stop, you won’t regret it.” Against her better judgment, she stopped. Inside the car with the man was Sarah Doukas, the head of the modeling agency Storm. Taylor-Joy’s response was immediate and unambiguous. “I have no interest in modeling,” she told her, “other than I hear that sometimes models become actors. And that’s what I want to do with my life.”

The rest proceeded quickly. She started auditioning. One day, a script arrived, and she tore through it in one sitting. She wasn’t able to sleep that night. She didn’t recognize the feeling at first. “I just knew I’d been possessed by something,” she says.

There was one complication. The character of Thomasin was described in the script as plain-faced. “I’m a lot of things,” she says. “But not that.”

It was Robert Eggers’ The Witch.

The production had no money, no stars and was going to shoot in a frigid Canadian forest. She went in and read for Eggers, and at the end of the audition, he knelt close to her and said: “Work on the accent. I’d really like to see you again.”

She got the part. She also was offered a Disney Channel show the same week and turned it down. She was going to do The Witch, and The Witch was going to do something to her, she sensed. When she arrived on set, she discovered Eggers had quietly changed the description in the script from “plain-faced” to “with big, haunting eyes.”

“That really moved me,” she says.

Eggers admits she wasn’t what he initially pictured when he wrote Thomasin. What convinced him was something else. “Anya was the only person who delivered the dialogue exactly as I heard it in my head when I wrote it,” he says. She understood the character in a way he hadn’t expected.

The Witch was made for next to nothing, which meant everyone was required to do everything. There was no such thing as “that’s not my department.” You helped with hair, you moved equipment, you figured it out. You earned your place or got out of the way.

Most also steered clear of the goat.

Black Phillip — the malevolent goat at the center of the film’s dread — was, by most accounts, a genuine menace. He injured Ralph Ineson, who played Taylor-Joy’s father, badly enough that Ineson and Eggers later made a pilgrimage to a famous London restaurant to eat goat in revenge. Taylor-Joy, a vegetarian, declined to join. “You boys do whatever you got to do,” she told them. She and Black Phillip had gotten on fine. “Animals and I have always had a connection,” she says. She had even tried to ride him. He was bigger than a standard goat, she notes, but not quite rideable. “We gave it a good go, though,” she says.

Years later, Eggers still talks as much about Taylor-Joy’s work ethic as her talent. He remembers an actor showing up barefoot in mud and freezing temperatures without complaint, becoming “a leader that everyone looked up to” despite it being her first film.

The Witch grossed $40 million on a $4 million budget, announcing Taylor-Joy to the industry without quite making her a household name. The years that followed were an education in patience — she appeared in films like M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass and the black comedy Thoroughbreds, good projects with interesting directors, but nothing that quite broke through to the mainstream. She waited. It took five years.

Then came a call from Scott Frank, the writer of Out of Sight and Minority Report, who had spent years trying to crack a faithful adaptation of Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel about a chess prodigy and her drug addiction. Taylor-Joy had 90 minutes to read the book before the meeting, after which she sprinted to Frank’s office and announced two things: “I was like, ‘It’s not about chess! And Beth Harmon has to have red hair.’ And he was like, ‘OK, sit down.’ “

Nobody thought it was going to work. Her friends thought she was crazy — six months to make a Netflix limited series about chess? But Beth Harmon was, in Taylor-Joy’s own accounting, someone she had already inhabited years prior. “Sometimes you feel like a character is ahead of you,” she explains. “Sometimes you feel like you’re both exactly at the same place. But with Beth, I had experiences in my own life where I just thought, ‘Oh, I can sort of big sister you through this.’ “

When The Queen’s Gambit landed in October 2020 — the world in lockdown, everyone at home, hungry for something different — it became one of the most watched shows in Netflix history. “It was one of those beautiful moments,” she says.

Which brings us back to Australia. Back to six months of don’t breathe, close your mouth, show no emotion.

The part had everything. The Mad Max franchise, a feminist icon, a $170 million production built entirely around her. She had stood up in the theater and cheered when she saw 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. “This was my dream,” she says. “It was my dream to be in these Mad Max movies and as this crazy feminist icon.” She understood the experience would have a profound effect: “I knew that I would enter Australia and leave changed. That’s part of what attracted me to it.”

What she wasn’t prepared for was the stillness Miller required. He wanted Clint Eastwood-in-spaghetti-Western rigidity. For an actress whose entire instrument is propulsion, it was suffocating.

Every day, for six months, she went back to Miller and made her case for one thing. When Furiosa finally confronts the man who destroyed her life — Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus — she should get to destroy him back. Not a clean kill. Something more total. Something that required Furiosa to be the one who decides.

In the final version of the film, Furiosa captures Dementus, cripples him, brings him back to the Citadel. Then she plants the peach pit she has carried since childhood — a relic of the world he took from her — into his body. Years later, a tree grows from him. It bears fruit. She picks a peach from it and brings it to the wives. The man who destroyed her childhood becomes, by her hand, the source of something new.

She is careful about how much she’ll say about Miller. “It’s a very difficult conversation to have,” she says. “If I were to be completely honest about my experience, it would hurt nobody but myself.” She can look at the film now and understand what he was going for. But she is glad she got her ending.

“I just advocated and advocated and advocated for her to live up to her name,” Taylor-Joy says. She spent the entire shoot lobbying for it. “That was my mountain on that movie, and I got it, but it was hard, hard won.”

Denis Villeneuve is a very different kind of obsession. Arrival, she says, is her comfort movie. “When I am sad, that’s what I put on.” So when she found herself with Villeneuve at a party in 2022 and he told her he had written a role for her in Dune: Part Two but that she couldn’t do it — she was committed to Furiosa, the schedules didn’t align, it was simply impossible — she went, in her own words, straight to begging mode.

“I was devastated,” she recalls. “I really wanted in on the world this man had built.”

So she went to Australia and made Furiosa — and the entire shoot she kept calling her agents. “What’s happening with Dune?” They told her it was over: They were shooting that, she was shooting this, and that was that.

“I was like, ‘It’s not over. I can feel it. I know it in my gut. This is not over.’ ” She sounded, she acknowledges now, crazy. But she was also right.

After Furiosa wrapped, Villeneuve called. Would she possibly take six flights, meet him in Abu Dhabi, continue to Namibia, shoot one scene in one day, and tell absolutely no one? She said yes before he finished the question. She brought her mom along for the trip.

“It’s probably my favorite filmmaking experience, ever,” she says. Ten people. A desert. One day. Her character Alia Atreides (sister of Timothée Chalamet’s Paul), a fan favorite who carries the voices of every Reverend Mother who came before her, was kept so secret that not even the other castmembers knew she was in the film until seconds before the world premiere.

***

For all her constant motion, Taylor-Joy is not a runner.

But Lucky Armstrong runs almost constantly across the series’ seven episodes. The director, however, was not looking for athleticism. “Run worse,” he’d tell her. “You are not somebody who is used to this. I want to see your arms flail. I want to see you struggle.” After eight hours of running, she notes, the struggling took care of itself.

She had only just started working out again the month before principal photography on Lucky began. “I figured,” she concedes, “that it might be good to have a base level of fitness.” (She brought her stunt double from Furiosa, Hayley Wright.) Injuries have been minimal, though she mentions almost as an aside that she’s lost some hearing from gunshots fired too close to her head. She is unbothered.

“I’m not fit,” she says. “But I’m stubborn.”

The experience taught her something she hadn’t expected. Witherspoon, she says, is immovable on the things she cares about — and completely pleasant about it. “Kindness doesn’t come at the cost of her vision,” Taylor-Joy says. “I find that really inspiring.” It was a different lesson than the one Miller had taught her, but it pointed in the same direction: Know what you want, and don’t stop until you have it.

Taylor-Joy lives technically between London and L.A. — though the L.A. part took some getting used to. For years, she told people that if she ever said she liked L.A., something had gone terribly wrong, and to take her “out back and shoot” her. She still can’t drive.

But she has come around, in the way that people who move somewhere for love tend to come around — reluctantly, then completely. She came here for the sake of Malcolm McRae, her husband, a musician whose band Searcher is based in this city, not the other way around.

Taylor-Joy has a theory about it now. “New York is a great first date,” she says. “New York takes you out, shows you everything it has on offer. L.A. makes you wait for it. L.A. is like, ‘You will take me to dinner many more times before I even show you I have a sense of humor.’ “

Then there’s a trip to Tolkien land, with Taylor-Joy recently cast as a new elf character in Andy Serkis’ The Hunt for Gollum. She’s “moved and transported by the original films,” by Peter Jackson, she says, and can’t wait to “travel to Middle-earth. Being an Elf in this world is a dream come true.” As for those persistent rumors of a Joni Mitchell biopic, she will neither confirm nor deny.

One recalls the hours young Taylor-Joy spent googling how people became actors: right place, right time. Years later, it’s almost impossible to imagine her accepting such a passive role in her own story. This is a woman who spent six months arguing with George Miller over a character’s fate; who kept calling her agents from the Australian desert insisting Dune wasn’t over long after everyone else had given up; who sees producing not as a promotion but as permission to get involved before cameras even begin to roll.

She may have been discovered by chance. Much of what followed came from refusing to leave things to chance at all.

This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.