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Anya Taylor-Joy says there’s ‘a thing’ she does on planes after she finishes each acting job

Actor who shot to fame in ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ finds it hard to let go of characters after playing them

Ellie Harrison
Wednesday 16 June 2021 08:24 BST
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The Queen's Gambit trailer

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Anya Taylor-Joy has revealed the unusual thing she does on planes after she finishes each acting job.

The star shot to fame on the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, and has also starred in The Miniaturist, Peaky Blinders and Emma.

In an interview in Variety, Taylor-Joy was asked by her Emma co-star Josh O’Connor: “Do you have a thing you do when you finish jobs?”

To which she replied: “I cry on planes. I cry hysterically on airplanes. But it’s good crying.”

The actor added: “My first heartbreak was not a relationship. My first heartbreak was finishing my first job [on The Witch], and experiencing that loss.

“The loss of there was a world that existed with a group of people that became my everything for a period of time, and now it’s over. I had no concept as to how to deal with that.”

She admitted: “I’m so completely mental.”

Taylor-Joy said her Queen’s Gambit character Beth will never really leave her, explaining: “I was so immediately connected to this woman.

“I will always keep her with me because I’ve never given so much of myself to a character before. I usually think about characters as so different from me, and I make a real point to make them walk differently, to have a different caliber of voice, to laugh differently, to cry differently.

“I want them to be their own person. But for Beth, it was the first time that I just thought the only way to tell this accurately is to give bits of myself up.”

Taylor-Joy can next be seen in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, a horror film about a young girl who time travels to 1960s London.

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