Where to Watch the Best Anya Taylor-Joy Movies and TV Shows – From The Queen’s Gambit to Furiosa
The original version of this article was written by Alexandra Kon and published in 2024.
Since her breakout performance in 2015’s The Witch, Anya Taylor-Joy has quickly become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, establishing herself as a unique talent with the ability to play roles across horror, drama and action movies while also being a central figure in a number of the biggest TV shows of the last decade.
Now, with The Mario Galaxy Movie on wide release and her appearance in the trailer for Dune: Part Three promising a more substantial role in that film than her brief cameo as Alia Atreides in Dune: Part Two, it feels like a good time to take stock of her career so far.
In this guide, we’ve rounded up Anya Taylor-Joy’s ten best films and TV shows to date and arranged them in ascending order — this is based both on how good the movies and shows are and on Taylor-Joy’s performances in them. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
10. The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2023 and 2026)
Finding the best Anya Taylor-Joy movies and TV shows for your watchlist will depend on your favourite genre. If you’re looking for a movie that offers a nostalgic kick and something younger family members can enjoy, the animated adventure The Super Mario Bros. Movie — in which Anya Taylor-Joy provides the voice of Princess Peach — should do the trick on both counts.
Taylor-Joy has now gone on to reprise the role in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie three— a less satisfying movie, to be frank, than its predecessor but a similarly lively and colourful journey through Nintendo’s IP catalogue.
8. Split and Glass (2016 and 2019)
In 2016, just before her mainstream breakout, Taylor-Joy starred opposite James McAvoy as the pseudo “Final Girl” of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, a supernatural comic-book horror movie that was eventually revealed to have taken place in the same world as the director’s earlier hit Unbreakable.
Taylor-Joy returned to the role in 2019 with Glass, the franchise’s climatic finale — although, despite bringing both Bruce Willis’ and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters from the original back, it didn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts.
Given how big Taylor-Joy has become and how much she’s done in the years since, it’s kind of amazing to think that The Queen’s Gambit — in which she plays the tortured chess prodigy Beth Harmon — only came out six years ago.
Gripping, fun, sexy and historically intriguing, this was the miniseries that made Taylor-Joy a household name. It was also one of the biggest hits in Netflix’s history — so, when it comes to the actress’s biggest roles, it’s going to take some beating.
In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Anya Taylor-Joy took on the role of Imperator Furiosa, playing a younger version of the legendary character first introduced by Charlize Theron in George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece Fury Road.
Released almost ten years later, this prequel film didn’t quite live up to the generational thrills of its predecessor, but with Taylor-Joy, Tom Burke and some incredible gliding contraptions, it came pretty darn close.
In 2015, Taylor-Joy blew the horror and arthouse world away with her performance as the rebellious teenage daughter of a Puritan farmer in Robert Eggers’s The Witch. Released in 2015, this was a film that (along with Ari Aster’s Hereditary) basically helped to establish A24 as the cultural juggernaut it is today.
Eggers achieved this by allowing for the idea that becoming a servant of the devil might actually be an attractive prospect, not least for a young woman at that time. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” Well yeah, I mean kind of.
Riding high on the breakout success of Queen’s Gambit, Taylor-Joy landed the coveted title role of Emma. in Autumn de Wilde’s delightfully fresh adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen novel.
Unlike other modern adaptations of the book (like Clueless), de Wilde keeps Austen’s story of a precocious matchmaker firmly in the appropriate era while allowing some more contemporary sensibilities to permeate the story.
Indeed, 2022 was the year that Taylor-Joy really cemented her reputation as an actress with the ability to stand out in the most glittering casts. A prime example of this was Mark Mylod’s pitch-black satire The Menu, a film that imagines what it would be like if The Bear and Succession had a baby.
Taylor-Joy stars as the most dubious member of a group of foodies who’ve been selected to dine at an exclusive and secluded eatery where the legendary Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) plans to serve far deadlier things than dodgy shellfish.
Seven years after Eggers basically discovered her with The Witch, the director and star reunited for The Northman, an historical epic that remains the highest budgeted movie in the director’s career — and it shows!
That war chest meant that Eggers was allowed to let his imagination run wild, creating a finely crafted and staggeringly period-accurate story about vikings, kings, mysticism and revenge. Alexander Skarsgård is wonderful in a physically imposing lead performance but Taylor Joy — who arrives as his love interest at around the halfway point — kind of walks away with the movie.
Around the time that Queen’s Gambit started to dominate the charts on Netflix, Taylor-Joy began her run as Gina Gray, the wealthy and scheming antagonist of Seasons 5 and 6 of Peaky Blinders.
If you’ve yet to see the show and appreciate period-set series like House of Guinness and Boardwalk Empire, you’ve got a solid few weeks of viewing to look forward to — you can even go see the movie after that.
A few years after breaking out in The Queen’s Gambit (more on that later), Edgar Wright cast Taylor-Joy in his noir-styled psychological horror, Last Night in Soho, alongside the similarly great Thomasin McKenzie — who you might recognize from her incredible performances in movies like Leave no Trace and The Testament of Ann Lee.
The film is not quite on the level of Wright’s Cornetto trilogy or movies like Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver, but it's well worth a watch just to see these two talented performers working together on screen.
