After years of speculation over who might fill Daniel Craig’s brogues, the announcement of the next James Bond finally seems imminent. Reportedly under consideration are names like Callum Turner, Jacob Elordi, Aaron Taylor-Johnson—all solid, though not quite thrilling, choices. But if I could throw just one more into the mix, it would be Anya Taylor-Joy. She’s not the most obvious candidate, to be sure. She isn’t British, though she did spend much of her childhood in London (Elordi is Australian). And among the small-minded, the idea of a female Bond remains unthinkable. Still, any reasonable person who witnesses her performance in the propulsive yet emotionally grounded Apple TV crime thriller Lucky is bound to find themselves thinking of 007.
Premiering with two episodes on July 15, this adaptation of Marissa Stapley’s 2021 best-seller casts Taylor-Joy in a role that combines the physicality of her Furiosa hero, the cerebral acuity of her character in The Queen’s Gambit, and the mesmerizing strangeness that has been her signature since The Witch. Taylor-Joy’s Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong is a con artist in a desperate situation. Both second-generation criminals who’ve tried to go straight, she and her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey), have just pulled off a classic final heist—you know, the kind that always goes wrong—and are celebrating in Vegas with plans to make an early-morning escape into anonymity. But when Lucky awakens, disoriented, in her hotel room, Cary and the cash have vanished. She’s left running from not just a tenacious FBI agent (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s Billie Rand), but also Priscilla, a deceptively refined crime boss played with icy calm by Annette Bening. The only person she trusts, her grifter dad, John (the recently ubiquitous Timothy Olyphant), is in prison.
It should be obvious that skillful pacing is a bare-minimum requirement for a good thriller, but the streaming era has produced so many bloated takes on the genre that Lucky’s constant command of our attention feels like a revelation. Showrunners Jonathan Tropper (Your Friends and Neighbors) and Cassie Pappas (Silo) have confined to a taut seven episodes a story other writers might have padded out to fill an overwrought 10. (In fact, they could’ve devoted more time to Rand, an obsessive-cop character that verges on cliché and leaves the wonderful Ellis-Taylor underutilized.) With Lucky both chasing Cary and being pursued by her powerful enemies, action scenes are frequent and dynamic; an early one has her darting between big rigs parked tightly together at a truck stop. But Tropper and Pappas also know when to slow down, using quiet moments to develop relationships, build suspense, or both. Tension soars as Rand approaches the isolated home where Lucky is hiding out with a grandmother and her girls.
She is there under false pretenses, having earned the guarded woman’s trust by saving the young granddaughters from a rattlesnake and then claiming that she’s fleeing an abusive husband. In the strictest sense, this is a lie. Yet Taylor-Joy lets us see that emotional truths underlie Lucky’s many deft deceptions; maybe Cary didn’t beat her, but he has betrayed her dramatically enough to put her in grave physical danger. I spent several episodes wondering whether the show would address how the character uses her gender—not just her sexuality, but her seemingly fragile beauty, her believability as a victim, the ease with which she helps and bonds with other women—to get what she needs out of people. When it does, quite late in the season but just in time to recast one of Lucky’s core relationships, the payoff is enormous.
Tropper and Pappas put twists in all the right places, effectively controlling viewers’ access to characters’ motives, loyalties, and backstories without coming across as manipulative. Larger questions arise organically, about parents who put their work—whatever it may be—before their children and about good vs. evil vs. the limitations of binary morality. There are many strong performances. Olyphant makes a captivating father figure, his outlaw-philosopher charm obscuring the inevitable flaws of a man who raised his daughter to be a criminal. Bening is fun in queenpin mode; look out for a scene that calls back to her iconic gun-range moment in American Beauty. Instead of succumbing to tropey writing, Ellis-Taylor fights hard for specificity.
But it’s Taylor-Joy who makes the whole thing work. She’s riveting in action sequences, balancing stealth and grace and fear and resourcefulness. Her face registers micro-emotions. Her wide eyes speak their own language of panicked blinks and observant stares. A closeup of Lucky engaged in any act of social engineering makes perceptible to the viewer hesitations and internal conflicts that would be invisible to her mark. Her only real disadvantage in playing a fugitive—or an undercover agent—is a presence so unusual, it can’t be believably disguised. Ultimately, though, distinctiveness is an asset for an action star. We like them to stand a bit apart from us regular folk. Bond wouldn’t be Bond if he could easily disappear into a crowd.
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