One Of Anya Taylor-Joy's Best Roles Put The Actress Through Her First Heartbreak

Acting is a pretty unusual profession. After all, most people don't push themselves through intense pretend emotions in order to earn a paycheck, which means there are sometimes some interesting impacts in an actor's life. There are all kinds of stories about how particular roles changed actors forever, but what about a film giving a performer their first heartbreak? Plenty of young actors have their first kiss onscreen, but a first heartbreak is rather unique. In Vanity Fair's "Actors on Actors" interview series, "Furiosa" star Anya Taylor-Joy revealed that she suffered her first heartbreak as a result of one of her earliest roles: Thomasin in Robert Eggers' 2015 folk horror film "The Witch."

"The Witch" is a seriously spooky slow burn of a horror movie that really puts Thomasin through the ringer as she contends with the forces of the devil after she and her family are ostracized from their Puritan community and her infant brother is kidnapped by a witch. That said, there isn't much in the way of conventional heartbreak in the film, so what gives? It turns out that she wasn't mourning any kind of romance, but rather her love for the movie itself.

Taylor-Joy has played a number of high-profile roles, but she really blew audiences away with her debut in "The Witch," giving one of her career-best performances so far. Still just a teenager, the young actor really threw herself into the role, but she found herself totally devastated when filming ended, telling Variety and Josh O'Connor:

"My first heartbreak was not a relationship. My first heartbreak was finishing my first job [on 'The Witch'], and experiencing that loss. The loss of there was a world that existed with a group of people that became my everything for a period of time, and now it's over. I had no concept as to how to deal with that."

Production on "The Witch" was a pretty isolating experience; not only because of the intense subject matter but because the cast and crew filmed in remote Ontario, far away from any civilization whatsoever. It makes sense then that she would feel completely enmeshed in the world of the movie and that she might grieve that experience ending. It sounds like filming "The Witch" was much more pleasant than many other horror films if Taylor-Joy was so reticent for it to end, which is probably why she chose to re-team with Eggers for his third movie, "The Northman." Despite having to deal with freezing mud, she called the Viking epic an "infuriatingly joyful" experience, so that's a win. 

It's just a shame that Taylor-Joy and Eggers couldn't re-team for the filmmaker's "Nosferatu" due to scheduling conflicts. Here's hoping they get to work together again in the near future.