Anya Taylor-Joy's Real Name: Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy

Quick answer: Anya Taylor-Joy's real name is Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy. She was born on April 16, 1996, in Miami, Florida.

Real name and early life

Biography.com gives her full name as Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy. Her first name is hyphenated, Anya-Josephine, and Taylor-Joy is her double-barrelled family surname. It is not a stage name.

Although she was born in Miami, she grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and moved to London as a child. She started pursuing acting at 16.

Quick facts

• Real name: Anya-Josephine Marie Taylor-Joy
• Known as: Anya Taylor-Joy
• Born: April 16, 1996, in Miami, Florida
• Known for: Actor
• Notable work: The Witch, Split, Glass, Thoroughbreds
• Sources checked: Biography.com, Golden Globes

Career highlights

After small TV roles, she broke through as the lead in Robert Eggers's horror film The Witch (2015). She followed it with M. Night Shyamalan's Split (2016) and Glass (2019), Thoroughbreds (2017), the BBC series Peaky Blinders, and the title role in Emma. (2020).

Playing chess prodigy Beth Harmon in Netflix's The Queen's Gambit (2020) won her the Golden Globe for best actress in a limited series, as listed by the Golden Globes. She went on to star in Last Night in Soho (2021), The Northman and The Menu (2022), Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), and The Gorge (2025), and she voiced Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) and its 2026 sequel.

For The Queen's Gambit she also won the Screen Actors Guild Award and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for outstanding lead actress. Critics often point to her range across horror, period drama, and action. That range shows in her move from the low-budget folk horror of The Witch to the large-scale action of Furiosa, where she played the young Imperator Furiosa, the role Charlize Theron originated in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Name notes

Some sites write her full first name as "Anya Josephine" without the hyphen. Biography.com uses Anya-Josephine. Fan sites often copy names from one another, so we checked this page against Biography.com and Golden Globes. Where sources disagree, we say so rather than guess. We also leave out middle names, nicknames, and origin stories that we couldn't confirm in a reliable source. A popular claim isn't enough to earn a place on this page if no encyclopedia, official record, or major news outlet backs it up.