As far as obsessions go, actor Anya Taylor-Joy has got her heart set. “I’m basically obsessed with anyone who’s passionate about anything. I find passion to be the most important driving force in life.” The words of a true creative mind, no doubt.
When we speak, the 28-year-old Mad Max: Furiosa and newly anointed Dune star is on the move. I’m curious to know where she’s calling home currently. She laughs, before sharing “It’s a very unusual time for me right now, because my base is constantly changing. I’ve been spending so much time filming and travelling for work, and particularly for longer periods of time than usual, that I’ve just learnt to build mini ‘homes’ for myself wherever I’m working at that time”.
“Like with Furiosa, I spent six and a half months living in Sydney, and by the end of it, I had gotten to know the city better than Chris [Hemsworth] did. I fell in love with the vintage shopping, and Bronte beach, naturally.”
Very early on in our conversation, I realise that Taylor-Joy is the kind of spirit whose magic travels. Even though we can only hear each other’s voices, and with limited time, she’s giving me her all through the telephone line. It should come as no surprise though – the actor is committed to and inspired by the pursuit of excellence. It’s a charm and magnetism that not only beams like a sparkling through-line in her work, but extends to the respect and grace she upholds within herself too. It’s one of the many reasons why Taylor-Joy and luxury Swiss watchmaker, Jaeger-LeCoultre were such an instant match.
“A big part of my story with Jaeger- LeCoultre, I actually owe to my The Menu co-star Nicholas Hoult. When we were filming the movie, we essentially spent almost two months on a dinner date that lasted 12 hours every day. And on one of those dates, he said to me ‘Hey, I work with this great watchmaker, and I think you should talk to them’.”
From that fateful moment emerged an almost two-year (and counting) partnership between Jaeger-LeCoultre and Taylor-Joy that has felt cosmic on all fronts – from their shared appreciation of the arts to an understanding and respect for the heritage that is imbued in both crafts. “I love that, through creativity, the need for something practical can become something incredibly useful,” she tells me. It’s this driving ethos that led to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s most iconic watch, the Reverso, after all – a timepiece Taylor-Joy admits she has a “soft spot” for.
“I went to the Maison’s exhibition in New York, and it was truly incredible to see the creativity that has resulted from such a practical innovation. From the teeny, teeny, paintings and artworks that have been crafted, even to the concept of the Duoface.”
“It actually encourages me to think about my life in that way of like, okay, so this is technically a problem, but how can we use creativity to make it something really useful.”
After listening to her speak so earnestly, I had almost guessed her answer to my next question before I posed it. “The watch that I wear every day… I basically became a bit obsessed with this idea that, for a lot of men, a watch is a sign of achievement, and I realised that isn’t necessarily the case with women,” she shares. “I wanted to be able to celebrate that particular moment in the same way.” Taylor-Joy goes on to tell me about the matching Reverso she shares with her Father, a piece they both connected with after the actor starred in her first Jaeger- LeCoultre campaign, and one she refers to as a talisman of sorts.
“We both selected different styles – mine’s a larger men’s-style silhouette, and my Dad’s has a leather strap. But we both wrote things on the inside of them, and I often think about how special that is to me. It will always be something that I can look at as a piece that I can pass down, and that we share.”
Taylor-Joy admits to me she’s someone who feels things deeply, and while she might be an air sign and I, a water sign, by this measure, we are certainly connected. Our conversation naturally leads to the idea of self-preservation, and how she continues to stoke her creative fire while also finding projects she is 100 per cent aligned to. She proceeds to tell me about her new method: “yes, and…”.
“I find that all good partnerships tend to be born out of a ‘yes, and’ situation. That’s when I know I’m meant to take on a project, when I feel I can add something to it and the process is collaborative.”
“Recently, which is quite ironic, considering I’m an actor, someone drew my attention to the concept of, ‘yes, and’. When you’re doing improvisation, you should never shut something down, you should always be able to say, yes, and add something to it.”
“I find that all good partnerships tend to be born out of a ‘yes, and’ situation. That’s when I know I’m meant to take on a project, when I feel I can add something to it and the process is collaborative,” she continues. Almost a decade on from her film debut in A24’s The Witch, Taylor-Joy clearly knows her path. So much so that it takes me by surprise when she shares she still often thinks about her 18-year-old self – she doesn’t take me as someone who tends to look back.
“What I find amazing about time, or at least my relationship with it is, I live my life at a very fast pace… And one of my favourite quotes from Tony Bennett is, ‘life teaches you how to live it — if you live long enough’. If I think back to some of my experiences from when I was younger, I tried to tell myself ‘Oh, this is going to take me down,’ or ‘I’m never going to recover from this setback’.”
“One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about being lucky to get older – because that’s what it is, if you’re lucky to grow older – you start having an appreciation of these feelings. You know that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that at some point, your relationship with that one particularly difficult experience will change, but you can only really know that from experience. And so, I see time as an accumulation of experiences that I just feel so insanely lucky to have, because the probability of being here at all is just so tiny.”
