Last year, it suddenly became easy to cast doubt on Anya Taylor-Joy. Not on her skill as an actress; most people who saw her in last year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga would probably agree that she maintains both a silent-movie expressiveness and an action-movie fierceness whenever she’s on screen, particularly in the movie’s showcase final dialogue scene opposite Chris Hemsworth. The trouble was how few people were enticed into seeing Furiosa to begin with; far fewer than saw Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie it prequelized, and which featured Charlize Theron in the Furiosa role. Is Taylor-Joy simply not as big a draw as Theron?
She’s probably not; Theron had been in movies for 20 years when the first Furiosa movie came out, which also happened to be the year that Taylor-Joy broke through with The Witch. (It was released in 2016, after premiering at Sundance in 2015.) But people watching movies at home, whether by coincidence or specific desire, can’t seem to get enough Anya Taylor-Joy. When Furiosa hit Netflix, it was a mainstay in their movies chart; it’s now been supplanted by The Menu, an even less current title, with Taylor-Joy’s face front and center on that thumbnail tile. Maybe Netflix subscribers are especially familiar with her following the success of the streaming miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, where she played a prodigious chess player. She’s branching out to another, less ubiquitous service this weekend with the premiere of The Gorge on Apple TV+. For most of the runtime, she’s one of two humans on screen; the other is Miles Teller.
The Gorge represents a stealth departure for her because it is, among other things, a romance, just in time for Valentine’s Day. She and Teller play elite black-ops type snipers who are separately recruited for matching posts in matching towers on either side of mysterious gorge. (Flown in by helicopter, they don’t even know where for sure they’re stationed.) Their job is to shoot anything that tries to come out – and at least in Teller’s case, he’s specifically instructed not to communicate with his eastern counterpart. But the two strike up a friendship across the massive gap, holding up signs with short messages, until they eventually decide to take their relationship to the next level: Face-to-face, binocular-free meeting. Taylor-Joy plays the more forthcoming, less strict of the two snipers; she initiates contact, and regards her not-quite-coworker playfully; she’s also the sniper who was apparently allowed to tote in her record collection, though maybe that’s just down to looser rules from whatever country hired her (her accent is Eastern European).
In most of her other famous roles, Taylor-Joy plays some combination of lonely or aloof; The Queen’s Gambit is predicated on her character being an orphan and something of a loner, her eventual romantic or sexual relationships not exactly replete with swooning. In Furiosa, she shares an obvious bond with one of her fellow rig drivers, and is affected by his demise, but in keeping with the movie’s characterization through action, they don’t actually have much dialogue or show a lot of physical affection. Instead, their relationship simmers underneath their steely surfaces. The Menu seems like her most normie part to date, although there’s some deceptive play-acting involved; though she’s presented as a patient girlfriend accompanying her guy to an elite restaurant, she’s actually a call girl, hired to ooh and ahh over the experience (and possibly get killed in the process). Her teen movie was Thoroughbreds, a Hitchcockian thriller where she plots to murder her stepdad; her superhero movie was The New Mutants, where she wields a flaming sword and a mean tongue. All the way back to The Witch, it’s her character’s isolation and alienation from a strictly religious family that leads her to, well, just say that it’s a satisfying ending.
It seems appropriate, then, that Taylor-Joy’s most romantic role outside of a tart Jane Austen adaptation is a mysterious and deadly sniper who’s enough of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan to own their most recent record on limited-edition orange vinyl. (Or maybe that just comes with the tower? The film is unclear, but the accompanying needle-drop is impeccable.) Her character’s somewhat goofy backstory gives her some grief over the planned suicide of her cancer-stricken father, which she knows will occur during her yearlong assignment at the gorge; it’s contrived as hell, but it does the job of contributing to her vibe of an imposing goth suppressing her pain. The old trick of a tough façade giving way works; when she takes such an uncomplicated liking to the taciturn Teller character, a story turn that should be obligatory, even flat, feels genuinely swoony.
The Gorge is nerdy fantasy in more ways than one: Yes, Teller and Taylor-Joy do wind up fighting a bunch of gnarly, mutated monsters in a sort of action-horror phantasmagoria, but it’s also a friendless loner’s fantasy of finding an equally friendless girl who can near-instantly devote all of her attention to his well-being. This should feel reductive to Taylor-Joy, whose roles have highlighted her striking beauty – those huge, piercing eyes! Those shifting wigs! – without quite turning her into a pin-up girl. Though some actresses have made great careers out of romances and “women’s pictures,” romantic positioning can also feel like a performer is being posed like a doll, forced to alternate relatability and desirability, in the sense of the old (and gender-normative) descriptor: “girls want to be her, guys want to be with her.”
It turns out that for all of Taylor-Joy’s aloof and alienated vibes, that reductive marketing might be the key to her appeal, too: Whether due to her own distinctive look or her personal taste in projects, she’s almost always impeccably styled in movies, whether it’s the rough-hewn Furiosa garb, all those retro outfits she wears during Last Night in Soho, or the simple, cool leather jacket of The Menu, in a way that seems at least as aspirational as it is lusty. On the romantic side, she seems like a cool girl who is very difficult to impress, which The Gorge exploits shamelessly (and effectively). Anya Taylor-Joy may yet give in and play a plucky single career gal who finds love when she least expects it. But her gift as an actress is to make something as ridiculous as The Gorge seem just as natural.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
The post The Eyes Have It: Anya Taylor-Joy’s Ascent Continues With ‘The Gorge’ appeared first on Decider.
