Stepping into the shoes of Jane Austen’s timeless antiheroine Emma in a new screen adaptation, the actor speaks to us about why she’s never compromised for less.

Oscillating effortlessly between twisted gothic thrillers and refined period dramas, Anya Taylor-Joy has mapped out an unconventional career rooted in escapism. Now stepping into the shoes of Jane Austen’s timeless antiheroine Emma in a new screen adaptation, the actor speaks to us about why she’ s never compromised for less.

Within the first five minutes of meeting, Anya Taylor-Joy is excitedly telling me about the best first date she’s ever been on. “Our lunch turned into six, seven hours of us wandering around antique shops and just telling each other our entire life story.” She recalls the story animatedly, her stupendously large eyes trained on mine. “We fell in love! It was basically the best first date I’ve ever had.” I’m currently sat with the actress in the practically sub-zero temperatures of a studio’s storage room in the depths of south London. An eerie array of prop oddities including mannequin torsos and comically jumbo-sized clocks loom ominously in the shadows, as well as one boisterously orange vintage sofa – where eventually all her lithe, deer-like limbs fold into when we sit down for a chat. The “date” in question was her first ever work meeting with Autumn de Wilde, an esteemed fashion photographer and director who has just helmed the latest screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s iconic 19th-century set novel, Emma – in which Taylor-Joy stars in the titular role. It is a sprightly, humorous wedge of a film, offering up sheer screen escapism and swoon-worthy shows of romance — think strawberries and champagne, beguiling glances over group picnics, and petticoats abound — and boasting a number of fantastic performances from an ensemble cast made up of the crème de la crème of British talent, or as Taylor-Joy calls them, the “merry little gang” of Johnny Flynn, Mia Goth, Josh O’Connor, Callum Turner, Bill Nighy and Miranda Hart. What you see on screen is essentially what you get: the on-screen chemistry between everyone is real. Mia Goth is one of Taylor-Joy’s IRL best friends. And she snickers gleefully “it was so much fun to argue with Johnny Flynn,” the singer and actor who plays her bickering love interest. They’re all active on a group chat called ‘MA’ whose avatar is an emoji of the head exploding, where they “continually tell each other jokes and write poetry.” At its crux, Emma is about a spoilt “anti-heroine” who meddles in the lives of others around her, and plays matchmaker to less than favourable results for all those involved. “Emma is acting from a place of fear a lot of the time,” Taylor-Joy surmises. “A lot of her comments that come out are because she’s deeply lonely and bored, and she also doesn’t know any better. She’s grown up in a place of privilege where she believes that she’s truly being kind in trying to improve people, but I wanted people to understand where she was coming from when she does say something mean. I think that in a world that’s very big on cancel culture at the minute, it’s really nice to have a story on redemption, and by the end of the film Emma understands that morally she prefers to be around good people that treat each other kindly, rather than the people that are deceitful and happen to be of the right class.”

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