Top 10 Anya Taylor-Joy Movies, Ranked

There’s a specific kind of unease Anya Taylor-Joy creates on screen — something behind the eyes that makes you feel like the character knows more than she’s letting on. It’s there whether she’s playing a Puritan teenager, a 1960s nightclub singer, or a post-apocalyptic warrior. That quality isn’t just atmospheric; it comes through in the smallest physical details, the way she holds tension in her jaw or lets a silence stretch just long enough to feel dangerous. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how completely she pulls you into a character’s interior world: the roles where you forget you’re watching an actor and start genuinely worrying about the person on screen. These ten films represent the best of that quality, ordered from great to unforgettable.

10. Glass (2019)

Character: Casey Cooke

Casey’s return in M. Night Shyamalan’s trilogy closer presents a different challenge than Split gave her, but Taylor-Joy makes every scene count. The most affecting moment comes when Casey stands across from McAvoy’s Beast in the film’s final act, and she doesn’t flinch or plead — she holds his gaze with a kind of wounded recognition, as if two damaged people are briefly seeing each other clearly. It’s a strange, specific emotional register that only works because of the trust the audience built with Casey in the previous film. Glass is a divisive conclusion to the Unbreakable saga, but her presence gives the whole thing a human anchor it would otherwise lack.

9. The Northman (2022)

Reuniting with director Robert Eggers for his Viking epic, Taylor-Joy plays Olga as someone operating on a completely different frequency from everyone else in the film. While Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth charges through his revenge quest with single-minded fury, Olga watches, calculates, and occasionally smiles in a way that suggests she understands exactly how this story ends. There’s a scene early in their relationship where she whispers a spell into Amleth’s ear and the camera holds on her face long enough to leave you unsure whether she’s mystical, manipulative, or both. It’s a supporting role in a brutal, maximalist film, and she carves out a presence that lingers well past the credits.

8. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

What Taylor-Joy does with her voice here is more interesting than it might first appear. She pitches Peach not as a fairy-tale princess waiting to be useful, but as someone who has already figured out her world and is mildly amused that Mario hasn’t caught up yet. The delivery is warm but never soft; there’s a dry confidence in lines like her training-course instructions to Mario that renders Peach capable without a trace of coldness. For a franchise built on decades of the character standing in a castle waiting to be rescued, that tonal recalibration matters. The film became a massive global hit, and Peach’s reinvention was a big reason audiences responded so enthusiastically to it.

7. Thoroughbreds (2017)

Character: Lily

Lily is the film’s central irony made flesh. Where Olivia Cooke’s Amanda openly admits she feels nothing, Taylor-Joy’s Lily performs empathy so convincingly that it takes the whole film to realize she might be the more dangerous of the two. Watch the scene where Lily describes her stepfather’s cruelty to Amanda: the way her voice catches, the careful deployment of tears, and then consider what you’ve just witnessed once the credits roll. Cory Finley’s debut feature is criminally underseen, but fans who’ve found it consistently point to this performance as one of the sharpest things Taylor-Joy did in her early career, precisely because Lily’s mask never fully slips until it’s too late.

6. Split (2016)

In a film where James McAvoy is doing something remarkable across 24 personalities, Taylor-Joy’s job is to be the still point at the center of the storm, and she absolutely holds that ground. Casey survives not through screaming or fighting but through watching, reading, and waiting, and the performance is built almost entirely on what Taylor-Joy does with her eyes and the set of her jaw in any given moment. The flashback sequences that reveal Casey’s history are devastating without being melodramatic, and they reframe everything we’ve watched her do in the present timeline. Split introduced her to a mainstream audience that had mostly missed The Witch, and Casey Cooke is the reason they stayed interested.

5. Last Night in Soho (2021)

Sandie arrives on screen like a fever dream: all cat-eye makeup, platinum ambition, and the specific glow of someone who hasn’t yet learned that London in 1965 is going to eat her alive. Taylor-Joy sells the fantasy version of the character so completely in the film’s first half that the unraveling hits twice as hard. The pivotal moment is a dance sequence where Sandie and her manager move together in a nightclub mirror, and the choreography slowly shifts from seductive to something that feels like a trap closing. Her expression changes by degrees, and you catch the exact frame where the dream cracks. Edgar Wright has called this his most personal film, and her performance is the emotional engine that turns his nostalgia genuinely dangerous.

4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

The ask here is almost unfair: step into a role that Charlize Theron rendered iconic in Fury Road and present it as a beginning rather than a pale imitation. Taylor-Joy’s answer is to play young Furiosa not as a warrior in training but as a wound that hasn’t yet hardened into armor. She speaks sparingly throughout the film, and that restraint is a deliberate choice. Watch the scene where Furiosa witnesses a particular act of violence and simply goes still, her face doing the work of a monologue. The rage is all there, but it’s still raw, still forming. Anchoring a blockbuster of this scale on physical commitment and controlled silence is no small thing to pull off, and she does it.

3. Emma. (2020)

Jane Austen’s Emma is notoriously tricky to play because the character is, by design, often wrong and occasionally insufferable, and yet the audience has to stay charmed enough to follow her for two hours. Taylor-Joy threads that needle by making Emma’s self-satisfaction feel almost endearing, like watching someone be confidently incorrect in a way that’s more funny than frustrating. The nosebleed scene, where Emma’s composure cracks completely after a social humiliation she caused herself, is the film’s emotional turning point, and the shift from brittle vanity to real shame happens across about four seconds of screen time. Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation is visually sumptuous, but it’s Taylor-Joy’s ability to make Emma both ridiculous and sympathetic that makes the whole thing work.

2. The Menu (2022)

Character: Margot

Margot walks into Chef Slowik’s exclusive island restaurant as an outsider and spends the entire film being the only person in the room with any actual sense. Taylor-Joy plays her with a grounded, street-smart energy that reads as almost alien among the film’s gallery of preening food-world elites, and that contrast is exactly what makes her so watchable. The scene where Margot finally orders a cheeseburger, a simple, unpretentious meal in a place built entirely on performance and pretension, lands as one of the most satisfying moments in recent genre filmmaking. It works because Taylor-Joy has spent the whole film establishing Margot as someone who refuses to perform for anyone. She earned a Golden Globe nomination for the role, which feels right for a performance this precisely calibrated.

1. The Witch (2015)

Character: Thomasin

Thomasin is where everything started. Eggers’ debut dropped Taylor-Joy into one of the most demanding roles imaginable: a teenager in Puritan New England, accused of witchcraft by her own family, losing her grip on what is real and what is damnation. The accusation sequences are genuinely hard to watch — Thomasin standing there, trembling and cornered, while her own mother screams at her — and Taylor-Joy holds every second of it without flinching. And then that final scene, laughing in the dark, is just burned into your brain forever.