Getting Lucky: Actress Anya Taylor-Joy takes on first-time producing duties for her new series

LOS ANGELES – When Anya Taylor-Joy talks about her new project, she is as enthusiastic about producing it as she is about starring in it.

She headlines Lucky, a seven-part action thriller debuting on Apple TV on July 15, playing a con artist on the run after a multimillion-dollar heist goes awry.

Speaking to The Straits Times and other media over Zoom in June, she is clearly proud of the fact she was one of the show’s executive producers – a fact she brings up unprompted several times.

The series, which co-stars Timothy Olyphant as her father and Annette Bening as the mob boss on her tail, is based on Canadian author Marissa Stapley’s 2021 crime novel of the same name.

The screen rights were acquired by American actress Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine, which is behind the Emmy-winning drama Big Little Lies (2017 to present) and the 2014 Oscar-nominated films Gone Girl and Wild.

Taylor-Joy, a British-American actress Emmy-nominated for her chess-prodigy role in period drama The Queen’s Gambit (2020), was offered the role of Lucky Armstrong, a reformed criminal forced to return to her old life for one last job.

“I first received a call hearing that Hello Sunshine wanted me to read a book and that they wanted to co-produce it with me, which is a dream sentence to hear,” says the 30-year-old.

“And once I read the book, I thought, ‘Oh, I actually have something to contribute. As a producer, you want to feel you have something – or fingerprints you can put on something – that will make it, hopefully, elevated.”

The dual role scratched an itch for the actress, who headlined the apocalyptic action film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) and voiced Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros animated franchise (2023 and 2026).

“Being a part of the producing team – and in on all the different decisions I’ve always wanted to be a part of – meant I got to shape the world this character was going to inhabit.”

Asked how she balances what she wants to do in her career versus what people in the industry want, she says it helps having her own production company LadyKiller, which is attached to Lucky, as well as her upcoming Netflix thriller series, How To Kill Your Family.

“I think it’s a dance, much like in life. You can control certain things, but if you’re going to be surprised by the universe, you have to leave some space for the divine – you can’t plan the things that will work out far better than you imagine,” says Taylor-Joy, who will appear in the science-fiction blockbuster Dune: Part Three in December.

“LadyKiller allows me to be obsessed with the things that I’m obsessed with,” she adds.

“I care about every aspect of how you make something – I’m interested in how it works, and I think that’s what I really enjoy.

“Because if I’m a part of all those discussions, then I get to show up (on set) and completely relinquish control because I’ve done all the preparation beforehand.”

She was drawn to the character’s ethical murkiness as well.

“The feminist in me was a bit frustrated at seeing a lot of morally ambiguous men and not that many morally ambiguous women (on screen),” says Taylor-Joy, who is married to American musician and actor Malcolm McRae, 32.

Her character offers a different take on the archetypal con artist.

“I love con men in movies, and they were always very slick and sexy when I adored them.

“But Lucky gave a different vision of what it is to be somebody who can never sit still, and who has to take from other people – that was a side of the con I’d never seen before.”

And she feels there is a lesson in how the character is betrayed by some people and helped by others.

“You know that old expression, ‘When a door closes, a window opens?’ The idea that everything is supposed to happen in a certain way, or whatever you focus on is the thing that magnifies?

“Somebody can let you down, then you can meet somebody else – and that will open up a whole other world of possibilities.”