How Anya Taylor-Joy Became Beth Harmon in 'The Queen's Gambit' | Rotten Tomatoes

Hi, I'm Anya Taylor-Joy, and this is how I became Beth Harmon. I fell in love with Beth from the first page. When I first heard that Scott Frank wanted to meet me, there was no script, but I got sent the book. And I'm a very avid reader, but even for me, I didn't, like, read this book. I devoured this book. So I was just so excited. And I saw a lot of parallels between myself and this person. To use, like, a 2020 phrase, I felt seen. You know, like, I really felt like this was reflecting something back at me that existed within me. And I don't often feel that way about characters, because characters for me are other people that I feel empathy toward, but not necessarily like, it's me. And I think the main thing between the two of us is Beth is an inherently lonely person. And I definitely had that growing up. And we both were searching for a world in which we felt like we were appreciated for the things that potentially, you know, other people that weren't part of that world would say were our flaws. And I found it in making art, and she found it in chess. I'm fine being alone. I feel safe in an entire world of just 64 squares. How Beth reacts to herself alone tells you pretty much everything you need to know about her. She is both terrified of being alone and also feels like it's the only place where she's safe. And that, the fighting of those two impulses is what causes her such pain, is she's desperate to connect and yet has been taught through her childhood that everybody will abandon her and nobody's going to be there for her, which is a pretty rough lesson to learn at any age, especially as young as Beth learns it. And I do think that's why she gets so involved with chess. She gets such a sense of security from being able to predict what's going to happen. I think she actually, or no, I know she actually says, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame. Beth has been so hurt by the world and she doesn't necessarily understand what she's done to deserve that. But yes, any moment that Beth is alone, I think tells you a great deal about her. And it's also telling that that's a big part of when she does partake in substances. Learning about addiction, one of the things that I found most interesting was that whatever it is that the addict is getting from the substance clearly worked for a period of time. The awful thing about addiction is that it is guaranteed to stop working and it will completely derail your life. And it was very important for both Scott and I that you understood as the audience, oh, this is Beth drinking because she's lonely. This is Beth taking the pills because she feels too much. This is her drinking as a form of punishment. This is her drinking as a form of celebration and understanding exactly what it is that she's getting from it each time. There is one player that scares me. Who? The Russian. The chess sequences and the substance addiction sequences were very important to us. And it was something that Scott and I spoke a lot about at the very, very beginning on our first meeting because, you know, the show is long. It is seven hours and there's a lot of chess and there's a lot of substance abuse. And so we had to make sure that each time it was fresh and exciting and it didn't just feel like we were recycling something consistently. And the beauty of chess is that it is played usually between two people. So whoever is opposite Beth in whichever situation does elicit a different reaction from her. Two of my favorite chess sequences are the first time that Beth plays towns because it's the first time that she doesn't necessarily want to beat someone. Like it hurts her to win in the brutal way that she does because, you know, she likes a boy for the first time. And the other one that I adore is the first time Beth meets a prodigy who is younger than her. That gets her. That really gets her. That like undermines her entire belief of self. And she just, I asked Scott, I was like, do I have permission to like fully attempt to psych out this kid? Like, I want to be up. I want to be moving. I want to be circling around him like a shark. And she was like, go for it. And I didn't tell the boy that I was playing with that I was going to do that. And it felt pretty good. Tell the readers of Life how it feels to be a girl among all those men. I don't mind it. One of the things that I find most fascinating about Beth and something I think will resonate with people is the fact that because she is so intelligent, because she sort of exists in this kind of, like just outside of society, even though this is set in the 60s, she is genuinely baffled that people care about her gender. They genuinely does not understand why people are talking about her being a girl rather than the thrashing that she just, you know, delivered to whoever it was that she was playing. And having that incredulousness, having that lack of understanding of like, wait, why does this matter? Was a wonderful thing to be able to portray, especially in the 60s. But I think something that will resonate with a lot of people now today, because it's almost like she wasn't gifted the handbook that says, you're a girl. This is what you're allowed to want. This is what you're allowed to dream about. This is what you're allowed to say. This is what you're allowed to embody. And because of that, it very quickly becomes that she's not out there to be the best female chess player. She's out there to be the best chess player, period. And I hope that as a society, we get to move towards a world where regardless of your gender, how you identify, you're allowed to want whatever you want and you're allowed to follow whatever dream that you want to follow. Chess isn't always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful. The fashion of Queen's Gambit was so much fun. I feel very, very lucky that Scott felt like he had cast the right person. And so I had a big part to play within like how we were going to dress her up, like the way that she was going to look. The first thing I said to Scott was she needs to have red hair. Like that was just something imperative to me because I wanted her to stick out like a sore thumb wherever she went. And the journey that we go through with Beth and the clothes, I think it's fascinating on two levels. The first being that the age that she is when I get to start playing her is the age where typically people are trying on different personas, like trying to see where they fit. And I had this idea that she sort of would watch movies or like have a muse and try and emulate that. So, you know, she goes to school and she sees the girls there for the first time. So she starts to try and dress like them and realizes, ah, no, that doesn't work for me. Then she sees her first Audrey Hepburn movie and all of a sudden it's, you know, the high neck black t-shirts and the cigarette pants. And it was just such a great way of charting where she was going. And one of the conversations that we had very early on was people worrying that she was too glamorous. And I just thought that that was the whole point, that it wasn't mutually exclusive, that you can be a brainiac and like nice clothes at the same time. Like it's not such a crazy expression anymore. And I love that she is unapologetically feminine in that. Because I think it would have been very easy to go, oh, she's a chess like genius. So that means that she obviously doesn't care about clothes. And I'm like, nah, that's not the way that the story is going to go. You just let them blow by and you go on ahead and do just what and how you feel like. I think potentially some of the experiences that I've had as myself really helped prepare me to play Beth. I think I was so lucky and I genuinely mean this. I was so lucky that the first people that I worked with never made me feel like because I was young or a girl, I did not have a seat at the table. And so when I showed up on The Witch, I was a collaborator with Robert. You know, it was never like you hush up, you sit there, you do what I tell you to do. It was a collaboration. And I think much in the same way that Beth experiences it in the chess world, I was sort of really shocked the first time that I ever experienced like true sexism on set. I was like, oh wow, I've been spared that for ages. So I think I had some of my own experiences to draw from. But by the time Beth was done, I was ready. It was good.