'I haven't had time to catch up with my personal life,' the 25-year-old actress said in an interview.
At 25 years old, Anya Taylor-Joy has become one of the most sought-after actresses of the moment thanks to the overwhelming success of the series The Queen's Gambit, in which she played the protagonist, worldwide.
Despite having previously participated in titles such as The Witch or the popular Peaky Blinders alongside Cillian Murphy, it was last year when her fame skyrocketed completely, something that has not been easy for the actress.
In recent years, offers have not stopped raining down on her for productions such as Last Night in Soho, which she has just presented at the Venice Film Festival, or Emma, based on the novel of the same name by Jane Austen. A frenetic pace of work that has led her to suffer from chronic stress, as she herself has revealed in The magazine.
International success came to her in a way that was as sudden as it was overwhelming and, to manage it correctly, Anya Taylor-Joy needed professional help: "It was a new stage in my life that I was not prepared for, and that made me feel helpless," the British actress confessed in an interview with Tatler.
In fact, the interpreter who gave life to Beth Harmon has revealed that during the beginning of this very intense period of work that she has experienced, she put her own life aside, prioritizing that of her characters: "I was putting so much energy into understanding these other people (their roles) that were like a vase being filled with different colored liquids and I had no idea who I was.
I definitely got to a point where I thought, 'I haven't had time to catch up with my personal life because I have been keeping all these experiences in a backpack and I continue to move forward,'" the actress explained.
During the break caused by quarantine, Anya Taylor-Joy realized that she had neglected her mental health due to her heavy workload and was diagnosed with chronic stress. A health problem resulting from the actress's succession of work efforts, since, when she finished filming Emma, she took only one day off before starting work on Last Night in Soho; an experience that she overlapped, in turn, with a single day off prior to the start of filming for The Queen's Gambit. "I survived on Diet Coke, cigarettes and coffee, and in the end, I thought I need to eat some vegetables," she has confessed, admitting how immensely stressed she was.
An interview in which she stated that she was so mentally tired that she was unable to go to bed after eight in the afternoon and that this frustrated her because she felt different from other people her age: "It can be difficult when you are young not to feel Guilty for not doing things that other 25-year-olds are doing."
Among the remedies that the actress has found to deal with chronic stress, Anya Taylor-Joy has explained that she goes into a dark room and starts listening to music randomly on noise-isolating headphones, which helps her escape. and don't think about anything. "Punching a pillow also works for me," the Queen's Gambit protagonist has joked.
