From small-screen star to couture queen, British Vogue’s April 2022 cover star Anya Taylor-Joy is Hollywood royalty in the making. Vogue’s Olivia Marks meets her in Paris. Photographs by Craig McDean, styling by Kate Phelan.

It is late January and the end of a glittering Couture Week in Paris. As fashion editors and models head for the Eurostar under a cold, cement sky, in a studio in an industrial north-east suburb of the city, rails of gowns – Gaultier, Alaïa, Alexandre Vauthier – plucked from the catwalk during the previous days’ shows, are waiting for another outing. From a dressing room, Anya Taylor-Joy emerges in a shimmering Dior dress, made from gossamer-light silver lamé muslin, which sweeps along the floor behind her. As she steps in front of the camera, fixing those saucer-sized eyes down the lens, a crown is gently placed atop her head. Like subjects in a royal court, we all coo approvingly: all hail Queen Anya.

There is, it should be noted, nothing remotely imperious about the 25-year-old’s demeanour. I go to say hello and Taylor-Joy immediately pulls me into a hug, then springs back, mortified: “Can I?” she says, in that high, husky voice of hers, worried she has crossed a Covid-appropriate line. (Later, wrapped in a bathrobe between shots, I glimpse her sneaking outside for a quick cigarette. Legend.)

Still, this regal get-up befits a screen royal in the making. These days, it feels like Taylor-Joy is everywhere: teenage lead in indie darling Robert Eggers’s skin-crawlingly creepy The Witch in 2015; a deliciously cruel Emma (“incredibly clever, but so bored”) in Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 Austen adaptation; tragic Soho chanteuse in Edgar Wright’s chilling Last Night in Soho last year. You must have seen her small-screen outing as red-headed chess genius Beth Harmon, in Netflix’s lockdown superhit The Queen’s Gambit, the part that properly propelled her to global renown, bagging her a Golden Globe, a Sag and a Critics’ Choice award, fantastical red-carpet fashion and fans galore.

And yet an otherworldliness remains. It’s the morning after the shoot and we are at her hotel, the Cheval Blanc, on the banks of the Seine. All of the energy she had on set yesterday is undimmed, as she bounces into view in a minuscule black mini, which, she reveals by lifting the hem, is actually a pair of tiny shorts (“you have to be able to climb a tree in any outfit”), a tight terracotta roll-neck and a pair of glossy black patent knee-high cowboy boots from Spanish brand Toral, which she also owns in “red shiny and purple satin, which I haven’t quite figured out yet…”

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