In Thoroughbreds, Anya Taylor-Joy Is A Twisted Teen Like You've Never Seen Before

Hell hath no fury like a bored little prosperous girl. From red scrunchie-wearing teen tyrant Heather Chandler to the "Marcia fucking Brady of the Upper East Side," Kathryn Merteuil, malevolent mean females projecting their unhappiness onto each person around them aren't anything new. Although in playwright Cory Finley's moody directorial debut, Thoroughbreds, they're frighteningly irresistible.


Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Amanda (Olivia Cooke) are two former childhood companions torn apart by the cutthroat milleu of adolescence in suburban Connecticut. Prim and genuine Lily lives a vapid existence in her prosperous, overbearing stepdad's baroque mansion, while social outcast Amanda spends her days in isolation, watching TV and mimicking emotions. In her own words, she has a correctly healthy brain — it just doesn’t contain feelings."


They're brought with each other once Lily, back early from a semester at boarding school, offers to tutor Amanda. Nevertheless it doesn't take long for Amanda to cut through Lily's good-girl facade, revealing the disaffected girl hiding in back of her peter pan collars and Chloé shades. From then on, a unlikely camaraderie is place on Earth, not out of friendship nevertheless rather out of necessity. They each lack what the other has in spades; one girl feels also much and the other nothing at all.


By the time they hatch up a plan to murder Lily's stepdad, this dark and funny teen noir already has you by the throat. MTV News chatted with Taylor-Joy and writer-director Finley about the psychological push and pull between Amanda and Lily, the late Anton Yelchin's scene-stealing improvisations (in what could be his final film), and the challenges of writing complex young females — as a dude.


MTV News: Anya, as a fan of your work in films like The Witch and Split, I've found that you tend to gravitate to more heady, psychological thrillers. Why is that?


Anya Taylor-Joy: I've never made the conscious decision to go soon after films in this genre. I'm very much character-oriented, so I read a script and if I feel like the character belongs to me and I belong to them, then I tend to follow them where they go. It just so happens that these characters have inhabited very dark worlds, nevertheless it's certainly not something premeditated. I go where my characters go.


Olivia Cooke (L) as Amanda and Anya Taylor-Joy (R) as Lily


MTV News: So what was it about Lily that made you wish to follow her? Because she is a ticking time bomb in this film.


Taylor-Joy: I loved the idea of those two ladies continuously usurping each other and manipulating each other through dialogue. What particularly drew me to Lily is I find that most of the time whenever you're doing character work you're working from the indoors out, whilst Lily is very much an outside-in sort of girl. She presents to the world a very intense veneer of perfection — it's all preppy and pastel. However in reality, because the movie goes on, you visualize the morality stripped away from her, and also you identify that she's this very messy, rageful chaotic disaster. I really wanted to chart that progression.


MTV News: Cory, this is your first experience in back of the camera. I'm curious how that experience was different that your theatre work. How collaborative was it?


Cory Finley: Before we ever began shooting anything we had a couple days of rehearsal that doubled as a really comprehensive discussion of who the characters were and where they had been coming from prior to the begin of the movie. Those conversations really informed re-writes of the script. So it was certainly a living document. We didn't do a ton of straight-up improvisation on set. Yet, Anton [Yelchin] was a real astonishing improviser and have a couple little quips that did make it into the final edit. I'd habitually attempt to come in with how a scene should feel and then find something a little bit more interesting in what the actors were doing.


Taylor-Joy: The script was so much a segment of the reason Olivia and I wanted to do it that we really didn't aspire to improvise. Although because Cory allowed us to have really long takes of dialogue, we would attack it with different energy almost every time, and you also never knew where you were going to just be. That's the benefit of having an actor playing opposite you who is ready to play with you, who is prepared to approach it in an other way each time. If one of us took a unexpected breath, it seemed like a vacuum blown up in a room — not like a vacuum cleaner nevertheless an actual vacuum, as in space. [Laughs.] The excitement and exhilaration of that was electrifying.


Anton Yelchin stars as Tim in Thoroughbreds, his final film performance.


MTV News: The tension of the full movie rests on the chemistry between you and Olivia.


Taylor-Joy: It's bizarre. I've never felt chemistry the way I did with Olivia, where from the second we met we were so physically, mentally, and emotionally aware of each other. It almost felt like we had this invisible string tying the two of us with each other. She would move, I would move. We become totally symbiotic. And two years on, it hasn't changed. We still move in tandem.


MTV News: Cory, what was your biggest takeaway being in back of the camera for the opening time?


Finley: What took me a little bit while to wrap my head around is the idea that as a director you must have a really clear idea of what you want and to untangle that from the idea of being really bossy. I'm not a bossy people. I don't like sorting people around. I don't think I did.


Taylor-Joy: You didn't.


Finley: Yet you do need to be deliberate in sort for each person else on set have the ability to do their work. You've got to give people a clear sense of what you're looking for. That's what activates their own processes and makes it a teamwork. It's easy for someone who's used to just writing, and seeing the things that I've written make their own way to life, it was an adjustment figuring out how direct to be.


MTV News: Because you're going from being a writing, where you're really only accountable for yourself and your characters, to being accountable for each person on a set.


Finley: What's fun about film as instead of playwriting is that you really can try things. You don't aspire to be randomly throwing darts and hope you hit the correct tone, although you do have room because it's an edited medium. You could try stuff and visualize what feels good, and wrong turns will not ruin your whole movie.


MTV News: Was there anything in particular that came out of just trying things?


Finley: There were a lot of moments where scenes took a different tone than what I had in my head, also it worked far better. It was fun working with two leads who are really focused and where every take is interesting, although they were both very prepared to try different things, so I had a lot of options in the edit in a really exhilarating way. There were a few scenes, in particular some of the early scenes, that we noticed this cool, slightly different tone a little bit later on. It's subtle.


MTV News: That scene where Amanda and Lily are outdoor and Amanda begins moving the chess pieces around defines the look of this movie. How did you set that up?


Finley: overall, we didn't do a ton of different setups per scene. We were pretty specific about what we were shooting, however with that one, we did a lot of different angles. I envisioned a lot of cuts, like, now you're on a moving chess piece, right now you're on a hand — a lot of jumping around. Nevertheless Olivia's physicality in that scene is so on-point and interesting and subtle that it ultimately worked best to just hang out in that wide shot and to watch the entire chessboard, almost you would a sporting match.


MTV News: You also got to work with three fearless young performers in your first film. That must have been exciting.


Finley: Each of these was truly my top choice for that role. I was in director heaven. Coming out of theater and having not had a chance to build up a crowd of repeat collaborators in film, I alternatively had the luxury of just reaching out as a fanboy to actors I really loved.


Taylor-Joy: Oh my god. Cory!


Finley: To have them become my collaborators was really exciting.


Taylor-Joy: And what Cory brings as a director in terms of working with us is that he has an enormous respect — without ever losing his own vision for the movie — for the relationship an actor has with their character. He gives you the space to be emotional about your character and is very gentle and graceful about it.


MTV News: I was actually surprised by how well you captured the intensity of female friendship, seeing as you have never been a teenage girl.  


Finley: I spent a lot of time writing mostly male-led plays that were much closer to my own experience and had a lot of female characters, who hopefully got stronger with every play nevertheless were also often in supporting roles, there to be the rocket-boosters on the man's arc. And one of my personalized challenges to myself with this was to put two female characters at the center of it and have it be about their relationship and not in any form about their relationship to a gentleman.


MTV News: Anya, I'm sure you've read a lot of scripts in which teenage females are depicted quite the other way. Were you surprised by the nuance in the film?


Taylor-Joy: I have a breathtaking team who shelter me from [those scripts] because they know that my instant reaction could be, "What the fuck is this?" That being mentioned, I should not be the exception. I should be the norm. People should be pushing really interesting, messy characters.


I've had a couple of moments on set and since, because Cory is a very lovely however a male through and through, where it's like, "How does he know us this intimately?" Olivia originally thought Cory was a woman due to the way the characters speak to each other and the intricacies of their friendship, especially at that age. It's quite a mystery how he pulled it off, however I'm grateful he did.