Anya Taylor-Joy Says She Loves "Deep, Dark Techno"

Anya Taylor-Joy has spent the past decade playing a chess prodigy, a wasteland warrior and animated royalty.Off camera, she says her taste runs toward the dancefloor.

Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 The Emmy-nominated actress, who became a household name in 2020 for her role as Beth Harmon in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, spoke with ELLE and described the 30th birthday party she pulled together in two days.It hosted 200 guests on a Wednesday in Los Angeles, with friends on the DJ decks playing what she called “pretty intense techno.” Taylor-Joy named the party ‘Spectral Spring’ and wanted it to look, in her words, “a bit culty,” with guests in long white dresses or suits and flower crowns.

She danced until 1:30 the following afternoon, slept for two hours and left for Coachella, then packed a bag and drove across the country.She said she trained in ballet and traded pointe for raving at 15, wanting something less controlled.

“That’s a pretty good split of my personality, to be honest,” Taylor-Joy said.“Ballet class and deep, dark techno.” Her affinity for electronic dance music is not new to readers here.

Her most notable contribution to the genre was for her role in the music video for Skrillex’s remix of GTA’s ‘Red Lips’, playing a woman fighting off demonic figures roughly half a decade before The Queen’s Gambit first premiered.Taylor-Joy lived in Berlin for six months while shooting the hit Netflix miniseries, later crediting the city’s rave culture as the driving force behind what she says was the healthiest period of her life.

“In Berlin, it doesn’t have to be unhealthy,” she said in an interview on The Drew Barrymore Show.“So my version of it, which I genuinely think was the healthiest I have ever been, was I would wake up on a Sunday, I’d have brunch, I would go to the club, I would dance for about eight hours, not talk to an...