Emma’s Anya Taylor-Joy on slapstick, set life, and playing Jane Austen’s iconic character

How the rising star prepared to play a character who “behaves as if she is the star of her own film.”

Anya Taylor-Joy first crossed many people’s radars in Robert Eggers’s 2015 indie horror film The Witch, in which she played the innocent teenage daughter of a pre-colonial American family who seems to be drawn inexorably toward a mysterious evil force lurking in the woods. In roles like that, or in films like Split (2017) and Thoroughbreds (2018), she’s played complex young women whose stories are hard to boil down.

Now the 23-year-old actress is playing one of the most familiar heroines in English literature: Emma Woodhouse, the “handsome, clever, and rich” young protagonist of Jane Austen’s Emma who flirts with romantic disaster by meddling in other people’s affairs. Taylor-Joy is a great match for the role, which required her to perform with almost slapstick comic timing as well as pull off romantic scenes with The Crown actor Johnny Flynn, who plays Emma’s best frenemy and main love interest, Mr. Knightley.

It’s a tall order to step into shoes previously worn by stars like Kate Beckinsale (in the 1996 TV movie adaptation of Emma) and Gwyneth Paltrow (in the 1996 theatrical film adaptation), but Taylor-Joy was up to the task. I spoke with her by phone about preparing for the role in the film, how she conceived of Emma, and why working with first-time feature director Autumn de Wilde was such a joy.

Alissa Wilkinson

Emma Woodhouse is a truly iconic character. How did you prepare to play her?

Anya Taylor-Joy

I spent a lot of time living with her in my mind, trying to understand how she saw the world. I think one of the first things I came up with was that Emma is in her own movie. She behaves as if she is the star of her own film, and everything is going to work out the way that she wants it to, which is why it’s so devastating and confusing to her when life has its own plans.

Then, as we started filming, because all the clothes were created on my body, I started to get a real sense of her. And accessories — like if I have a really exceptional coat that has an incredible back, I’m going to start delivering my lines over the shoulder because that’s the kind of girl Emma is. Emma wants you to look at the coat.

Alissa Wilkinson

Emma seems much funnier to me in this adaptation than she has in some others. How did you develop her sense of comic timing?

Anya Taylor-Joy

It was my first time doing proper comedy. So if you like the comic timing, I guess I’m really glad it worked out because I was just giving it a good go.

That being said, as a cast, we watched [Howard Hawks’s 1938 comedy classic] Bringing Up Baby, and that was really important for us to be able to understand the level of slapstick that Autumn [de Wilde] wanted in our film. And I think that made us very liberated in our choices, especially in our physical ones.

Alissa Wilkinson

Is there any particular key to getting that slapstick delivery just right?

Anya Taylor-Joy

I act and I feel very much in beats. I think it’s about hitting the right beats when somebody says something. I wish I could give you all the hints and tricks, but it’s a very instinctive feeling for me.

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Alissa Wilkinson

Plus, I imagine your fellow cast members are a big part of it — playing off one another.

Anya Taylor-Joy

Oh, of course. You have to react to whatever anybody else is giving you, and that’s what was so much fun about this film. I was such a fan of everyone I was getting the chance to work with. So every day you go into work and you get a new sparring partner, you know, and you have to acclimatize to their rhythm and then fight them at their own rhythm, too.

Alissa Wilkinson

And you got to have Bill Nighy play your father.

Anya Taylor-Joy

If you’ve ever met him, you know he’s just the most wonderful human being on the planet Earth. In the dictionary under “cool cat,” there is a photograph of Bill Nighy. That’s just the way it goes. I am so fortunate to have worked with him and to have been able to share screen time with him, but I’m infinitely more fortunate to have him as a friend. I just adore that man.

Alissa Wilkinson

Were you familiar with Emma before you started preparing for the role?

Anya Taylor-Joy

Yes, I read Emma when I was 11. I really, really enjoyed it. I think I was a little bit too young to understand the pure genius of it. I read it when I was 11, and then I re-read it before the script was completed on this one just so I could I have an understanding of the book before. … I don’t like to read the book when you’re doing the movie because, at that point, the script becomes, you know, the Bible, so you can only really work off the script. But prior to the script being finished, yeah, I read the book again.

Alissa Wilkinson

What did you find yourself thinking of when you re-read the book as an adult?

Anya Taylor-Joy

It definitely rewards re-reading, because the way in which it’s structured was, at the time, completely novel. There had never been another book written both from the perspective of the character but also allowing the audience to see the protagonist from another character’s perspective.

There were a whole bunch of little things that definitely helped me in my understanding of Emma. Like there’s this tiny, little almost an aside in the book that says, “With her hair done and the maid sent away, Emma sat down to be miserable.” That just meant everything to me. I was like, “God, this girl really is in her own movie. She’s so theatrical. She’s now going to play the scene of herself being upset even though there’s nobody there to see it.” That was really helpful to me.

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In terms of themes, Jane Austen was a brilliant satirist. The way in which she delves into human emotions, there’s a reason these books have stuck around for such a long time, and it’s that human beings haven’t really changed that much. Our modes of transport have. But core feelings of jealousy and envy and arrogance and love and beauty, they all remain. I think the book can be read any time, and you’ll always feel and find something that connects to you now in the present.

Alissa Wilkinson

Watching this film, I found myself thinking about how much of Austen’s satire is directed at the boredom of the upper classes. Everyone just seems very bored all the time, just trying to find something to do with the day. Which seems a little bit like life on set, right? Hurry up and wait?

Anya Taylor-Joy

There’s a lot of sitting and waiting around. That being said, when you’re with a group of people that you love so much and they’re all so talented — we ended up doing the weirdest things. We would play, like, charades. We would make up songs from the perspective of the servants. We got into an epic — but, like, epic — fight about the correct way to eat a Kit Kat. We would choreograph dances for each other. We would play hide-and-seek. We were very entertained. We were like children at summer camp and then randomly someone would be like, “Oh, we’re filming the scene again,” and it’s like, “Ah, okay, gotta go do my job. Bye!”

Alissa Wilkinson

What was it like being in those settings? It must feel a little like you’re playing dress-up.

Anya Taylor-Joy

Oh, absolutely! Again, that all added to the summer camp feel. Autumn de Wilde is actually a very successful Emma. Emma doesn’t match-make particularly well, but Autumn “friend makes” very, very well. She brought a whole bunch of people together who became instant friends, and then we would travel around the countryside, from beautiful mountains to beautiful hamlets, and just hang out. That’s what we did. It was one of the best summers of my life, really. We just had such a good time. Especially the house that is [the Woodhouse home], Hartfield, Firle Place, which is just outside of Brighton. I loved living in Brighton. I loved going to work every day in the same location. We would all have lunch outside on the lawn. It was magical.

Alissa Wilkinson

You’ve had a lot of different sorts of roles, from The Witch to Split to Thoroughbreds. Is there any commonality between the characters you’ve played?

Anya Taylor-Joy

If I asked all of my characters to sit down and have dinner with me, I don’t know if they’d get on. They’re all quite different people. All I can say is I always seem to be playing somebody that aligns with wherever I’m at in my own life, with the lesson I need to learn or something like that. I’m not saying that when I was playing Casey [Cooke, from Glass], I was kidnapped on the inside — that wasn’t what was going on — but I needed the experience, and I needed the catharsis of letting go in that way. They always seem to end up almost being like a form of therapy to me. I always grow and learn something from them.

Alissa Wilkinson

So, from Emma, then — what did you learn from her?

Anya Taylor-Joy

I went into Emma very anxious. I had been working back-to-back-to-back for four years, and I was suddenly presented with a whole bunch of actors that I really admired. I had a bit of imposter syndrome. I felt very much like, “Oh God, I’m supposed to lead this ship, and what if I’m not good enough?” I tend to forget my accomplishments very quickly. I have the memory of a goldfish that way.

But I do better with facts, and by the end of Emma, there was an undeniable fact that I had shown up every day, done my best, and I think had done good work. So I learned how to take stock of my accomplishments from Emma, if that makes sense.

Alissa Wilkinson

That feels appropriate to the character. She’s given all this responsibility as a leader in her community. Everyone defers to her all the time. But she’s very young and vulnerable and even naïve, in a lot of ways. It seems like a terrifying position to be put in.

Anya Taylor-Joy

It sounds so lame and it sounds so sappy, but the audience is watching Emma’s coming-of-age, and I was experiencing my own coming-of-age story off of that set. I definitely feel like I went in there more of a girl and I left a young woman.

Emma opened in theaters on February 21.