Anya Taylor-Joy once recalled the advice her mom gave to her after she was bullied for her looks.
At just 28, this model-turned-actress has captivated audiences since her breakout role in the 2020 Netflix sensation The Queen’s Gambit. Her impressive talent has shone through in films like M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, and more recently Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Anya Taylor-Joy was bullied growing up
While promoting her movie, The Menu, the actress stopped by The Drew Barrymore Show in 2022. She candidly shared her experiences with bullying as a child and opened up about the challenging road she traveled to achieve success. With heartfelt appreciation, she thanked her parents for their unwavering support and encouragement throughout her journey.
.jpeg "Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu")
Taylor-Joy shared, “I was very, very lucky with my parents because when I was bullied for my looks, my mom always said, ‘You look at the inside of somebody, you look at the inside of somebody.’ You don’t look at class, you don’t look at anything like that. You don’t look at what they do for a job. It’s just: ‘Do you like that person’s heart?’”
The actress previously spoke out about her isolated childhood, saying her only friends were “the characters in the ‘Harry Potter’ books.
“I spent the first two years in England playing hand-clap games with plants — if you slap them hard enough, they clap back — and learning how to read,” Taylor-Joy told Entertainment Tonight last year about moving from Buenos Aires, Argentina to the UK as a kid.
She continued, “That was my existence. I didn’t hang out with other kids. I was clearly a very normal child.”
In a 2016 interview with W Magazine, Anya recalled being bullied for her eyes, after the reporter described the at-the-time 20-year-old actress’ eyes as “beautiful” before adding: “They’re so far apart.” (Via Bored Panda)
She recalled the heartbreaking event: “I can definitely remember when Facebook was a thing and I was never aware that my eyes were far apart and then someone tagged me in a picture with a fish and they were like, ‘This is you ’cause your eyes are like here.
“And I was really upset about it and I didn’t enjoy it and I kind of stopped looking in mirrors for a very long time.”
Anya Taylor-Joy says her intensity is scary to some
Anya Taylor-Joy believes she was bullied in school because her intensity and passion can be "frightening" for some people.
"The message I was getting at school was that everything about me was wrong. I think the way that I looked played into it, and then the extremes of my personality definitely played into it,” she told Britain's GQ magazine's Heroes issue.
"If I loved something, I loved something. I have no chill in any regard, and that can be frightening for people, I guess.”
She told VICE: “As a kid I’d consistently go up to my mum and say, ‘Why am I different? Why do I feel this way? Why do I see a flower and start to cry?’ She was always sweet about it because it used to really freak me out when I was little.”
In a previous interview, the star admitted that at times she had felt like she had struggled to fit in.( Via Standard)
The star was born in the US and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, before moving to London when she was eight.
At the time she did not speak a word of English and found it hard to adapt to her new home country.
“Argentina is all green and I had horses and animals everywhere – all of a sudden I was in a big city and I didn’t speak the language,” she recalled to The Sun.
“I didn’t really feel like I fitted in anywhere. I was too English to be Argentine, too Argentine to be English, too American to be anything. The kids just didn’t understand me in any shape or form. I used to get locked in lockers.”
The effect, she said, was that she spent a lot of time in school “crying in bathrooms”.