Anya Taylor-Joy Isn't Ruling Out A Season Two of 'The Queen's Gambit'

Anya Taylor-Joy is opening up about the insane success of The Queen’s Gambit with Elle magazine.

The 25-year-old actress shared her thoughts about a possible second season and why she’s not ruling it out in her future.

“It would be silly of me to go, ‘There’s never going to be a second series,’ and then I’m 40, and Scott [Frank, showrunner]’s like, ‘Yo, how do you feel about this? You want to go back?’”

Click inside to see what else Anya Taylor-Joy shared about the future of the Netflix show…

She also opened up about her hopes for what’s next for Beth.

“I hope she starts doing things for her own enjoyment. I’d like Beth to pick up Benny and spend some time with him in Russia, just the two of them being snobby intellectuals together, and I hope she has a Bowie phase,” Anya says.

See what else Anya shared in her cover story below:

Anya on the success of The Queen’s Gambit: “Especially at the beginning, it was very surreal, because I was spending every day with no shoes in minus-three-degree weather on the side of a mountain. So going home to an apartment and seeing texts like, ‘A lot of people have watched the show’…I’m not great at numbers. The most I can hold in my head is, like, a stadium’s worth.”

Anya on being bullied as a child: “I joke about this, but I’m kind of serious when I say that the characters in the Harry Potter books were my friends. I spent the first two years in England playing hand-clap games with plants—if you slap them hard enough, they clap back—and learning how to read. That was my existence. I didn’t hang out with other kids. I was clearly a very normal child.”

She added that she’s not talking more about it “not because it’s traumatizing, but just because I don’t want to give it the airtime. It just really pushed me. Much the same way as Beth needed chess, I needed acting. I needed to believe in a place where I could be valued and appreciated, and actually have something to contribute rather than constantly feeling like, ‘What is wrong with me, and why do I not fit in?’”

Anya on almost quitting acting: “She [Emma co-star Mia Goth] was the first actress close to my age that I met, and we had a very cool conversation where I was like, ‘I love you,’ and she said, ‘I love you.’ And I said, ‘I’m always going to have your back.’ And she was like, ‘I’m always going to have your back.’ It was like, ‘Okay, cool. Let’s progress in this very wild industry, knowing that we’re going to take care of each other.’”

“I had been working back to back—just before Emma, I’d done two projects at the same time, and I was going through some emotional relationship stuff,” she continued. “So at the beginning of 2019, I was just really broken and frightened of everything, and Mia and I were driving back from rehearsal. I turned to her and said, ‘I think I’m going to quit acting. I don’t think I can do this.’ And I’ve never seen Mia look so worried in my life. She was like, ‘But…that’s what you do. You can’t not…what are you talking about?’ I was like, ‘I think I need to back out now and just let it be and try to take care of my heart.’ And she was like, ‘No, that would be really bad. You can’t not have the thing that is your oxygen.’ I’m really glad she said that.”

Anya has more ideas for a second season of the show. Read them here…