See Anya Taylor-Joy Nuzzled By A Koala Bear
In a new video posted to instagram, Anya Taylor-Joy gives and gets love from an adorable koala.
The Queen’s Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy is currently in Australia filming Furiosa, the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, but she spent her day off from filming visiting a koala conservation center. She posted video and photos from the visit on her Instagram, during which she dressed down from her usual glamourous looks, wearing a deep purple fleece top and black pants, with a bandana on her head. In the video, the koala looked to be genuinely curious of Anna, eventually crawling up into her arms for a photo opp.
In the caption to her Instagram post, Anya Taylor-Joy reflected on the plight of koalas, and even mentioned taking a break from the “wasteland” of the Furiosa set. “In a rare respite from the wasteland, I was lucky enough to go and spend a day learning about the incredible fauna of Australia, specifically koalas,” she wrote. “The spreading of awareness of what deforestation, climate change and frankly, a multitude of mostly human caused issues is doing to our fellow earthlings is devastating but necessary.”
Anya Taylor-Joy also expressed her appreciation for conservation centers for the work that they do and to the volunteers who staff them. The wildfires that devastated the Australian countryside in 2019 and 2020 is believed to have killed hundreds of koalas in the wild, and Taylor-Joy thanked the veterinarians at the conservation hospital for helping those koalas who survived the fires but were injured or burned.
Oscar-winning filmmaker George Miller cast Anya Taylor-Joy to star in the prequel as a young Furiosa, a role made famous by Charlize Theron, after seeing her performance in Last Night in Soho. He wrote and directed all of the Mad Max films, which made superstars out of Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy, and he is helming Furiosa as well. Not much is known about the plot, but we do know that Thor himself Chris Hemsworth and his wife Elsa Pataky also star in the film in undisclosed roles.
It’s going to be a busy next year for Anya – not only is she working on the Mad Max prequel, but she will soon begin work on two more films: The Gorge with Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick) and the thriller Laughter in the Dark. Next year, you’ll hear her voice as the character of Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, opposite Chris Pratt. She recently had to drop out of another Robert Eggers film, the Nosferatu remake with Harry Styles, after production troubles delayed the film, leading the director to call it “cursed.”
Anya Taylor-Joy rose to stardom at the age of 19, starring in Robert Eggers’ 2015 period horror film The Witch, in which she played Thomasin, a young girl seduced by the devil himself to join a coven of witches. She teamed up with Eggers again for his latest film, the Viking epic The Northman, which opened in theaters earlier this year. She won a Golden Globe in 2021 for her role as chess prodigy Beth Harmon in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit.
She is also known for her role as Casey in the M. Night Shyamalan films Split (2016) and Glass (2019), which formed a trilogy with the Bruce Willis/Samuel L. Jackson film Unbreakable. Anya Taylor-Joy can be seen in theaters now in the film Amsterdam, from director David O. Russell, as well as the series Peaky Blinders.
Furiosa is due to hit theaters on May 24, 2024.
