Anya Taylor-Joy became widely known for her role as chess prodigy Beth Harmon on The Queen’s Gambit, but would you guess that she’s a raver at heart? She definitely doesn’t make it obvious just by looking at her. But in an interview for the September 2026 issue of Elle magazine, she admitted that she’s always been drawn to intense experiences.
Her interest in rave culture began at 15 years old, she said, after years of ballet training. The rigidity of classical ballet didn’t work for her anymore, and she needed somewhere to break free. “That’s a pretty good split of my personality, to be honest,” said Taylor-Joy. “Ballet class and deep, dark techno.”
For her 30th birthday, she described pulling a party together in two days for a Wednesday in L.A. She gathered 200 people in one place and threw her own “culty” warehouse rave. Her friends DJed “pretty intense techno,” she said, “which I realized is not everyone’s cup of tea, but they got into it.”
According to Taylor-Joy, she partied that night until 1:30 in the morning, got two hours of sleep, then woke up and went to Coachella. After that, she went back to L.A., packed, and headed out on a cross-country road trip. That’s the intensity with which she approaches every aspect of her life and work, she explained. So, it kind of makes sense that she’s into heavy, dark, feel-it-in-your-chest EDM.
Anya Taylor-Joy Describes Living Among the Rave Culture in Berlin as ‘The Healthiest I’ve Ever Been’
But Anya Taylor-Joy hasn’t limited herself to just listening to intense techno. In 2015, she was featured in the music video for Skrillex’s remix of GTA’s “Red Lips”. It’s definitely not the heaviest techno remix ever, but that’s not what people go to Skrillex for, is it? However, it still served to shine a spotlight on Taylor-Joy, as she made her major film debut in The Witch that same year.
While filming The Queen’s Gambit, however, Taylor-Joy experienced one of the “healthiest” times of her life. She credited that to living in Berlin for six months, and submerging herself in the rave culture there.
“In Berlin, it doesn’t have to be unhealthy,” she said in a 2022 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show. “So my version of it, which I genuinely think was the healthiest I have ever been, was I would wake up on a Sunday, I’d have brunch, I would go to the club, I would dance for about eight hours, not talk to anybody, go home, eat a bowl of spaghetti, and wake up at four o’clock in the morning and go to work.”
Photo by VALERIE MACON / AFP via Getty Images
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