How horror star Anya Taylor-Joy became Jane Austen's latest screen 'Emma'

As a suspected witch in Puritan New England, Anya Taylor-Joy holds her tears back out of indignation. As an abducted teenager, she allows them to silently stream down her face as she stares at her captor. As a devious high schooler perfecting a fake sob, she mimics the experience of choking.

The 23-year-old actress makes a point of differentiating her crying technique in every film. Each character she embodies is an entirely different human, she recently explained in an interview, and if she ever sees "a flash of Anya, that upsets me because ... I want them to stand alone."

As Emma Woodhouse, the meddling Jane Austen heroine, Taylor-Joy weeps out of selfishness before she breaks down due to true heartbreak. Now in theaters, "Emma" is the directorial debut of photographer Autumn de Wilde, who puts her own spin on the oft-adapted novel by injecting it with the DNA of a screwball comedy. As such, crying isn't all Taylor-Joy, an indie darling for her work in horror-thrillers such as "The Witch" and "Thoroughbreds," was tasked with switching up; her latest project called for a sense of humor she has rarely had the opportunity to exhibit at this level.

That's just how her career turned out, Taylor-Joy said, as she never set out to make her name in a specific genre, but instead chooses projects for challenging stories and characters. Growing up in England, she was keenly aware of "Emma." She first read the novel at 11 years old, again at 15, and once more before shooting the film, when "there were elements of Emma's theatricality that really jumped out at me."

"There are little paragraphs that are like, 'With her hair ragged and the maid sent away, Emma sat down to be miserable,'" Taylor-Joy recalled, to near perfection. "I just loved that. This woman is living in her own film, and everything is dramatic and opulent. ... When I agreed to take the role, I said, 'I only want to do it if I can stay true to Austen.' She'd written a character that no one but herself would quite like."

Like much of Austen's work, "Emma" satirizes upper-class society, centering on a "handsome, clever and rich" 20-year-old who has vowed to never marry and instead lives alone with her hypochondriac father (Bill Nighy). She spends her time matchmaking - though her neighbor and close confidant George Knightley (Johnny Flynn) would likely refer to it as interfering. Such as in the case of her fawning companion Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) and the local vicar Philip Elton (Josh O'Connor), Emma's efforts to set up her friends and acquaintances are generally well-intentioned but often misguided.

In preparing her pitch, de Wilde thought to present producers with her dream cast to capture "some very specific ideas for how I saw the characters." As an established rock photographer who has toured with musicians such as Beck, Death Cab for Cutie and the White Stripes, she found herself drawing similarities between the frenetic, contained setting of Emma's small town and, unexpectedly, that of a tour bus.

"Everyone's young and full of passion, and mistakes are made," she said. "Things are glorious, and there's a lot of drama. ... I know it sounds weird to use the word, but a real rock star also presents themselves as foolish and untethered, and then the king of the world, and then exhausted and overwhelmed and fragile. ... I wanted to bring that through the actors and their performances."

Unconcerned as to how her version of Emma would compare to those past - most famously, a charming Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 adaptation - de Wilde focused on presenting a "complicated heroine," or one who would be unlikable at times. She needed a rock star actress who could "handle the untying of Emma," who could go from pompous to vulnerable and back again. Taylor-Joy had displayed a complexity of emotion in her horror work, transforming from seeming victims into twisted antiheroes.

"That was remarkable to me," de Wilde said. "It also proved to me that she was a 'story first' actor, not a 'pretty first' actor. She obviously has this stunning beauty, but I could really tell that she abandoned all thoughts of how she looked to really grasp hold of a character."

Emma's eventual love interest, Mr. Knightley, captures audiences' hearts right away. De Wilde fashioned him an introductory scene that has already elicited gasps, drawing upon the provocative spirit of Austen's own storytelling. We see Mr. Knightley bare from the back as the man helping him change into Alexandra Byrne's couture designs flits about, draping garment after garment onto the gentleman.

"I thought a very poetic, almost painterly beginning to him as a human would make you go, 'This is the man I'm supposed to love,'" de Wilde said of the scene.

Emma, on the other hand, is endeared to audiences through her flaws. De Wilde has heard from young women who relate to Emma's "dark side," who themselves have done something horrible and then immediately regretted it. That's what gives the character depth and makes her so rewarding to work with, the director continued. Emma is "not 100 percent a bully, but she sometimes bullies."

Never is that relatability more crushing than when Emma runs her mouth in the story's infamous picnic scene, insulting Miss Bates (Miranda Hart), a talkative acquaintance of lesser means, by remarking upon her tendency to drone on. Miss Bates flees, and Emma, immediately overcome with shame, is left to contend with what she has done. After Mr. Knightley chastises her, she descends into tears.

While aspects of Emma resonate with Taylor-Joy, she doesn't approach projects looking for similarities. Emma's tears - which serve a more redemptive purpose than those of Taylor-Joy's other characters - were shaped by a lesson the actress learned shooting a crying scene for the psychological horror film "Split," during which director M. Night Shyamalan "completely changed" her acting style.

"I did the scene and Night very sweetly came up to me and said, 'Anya, that was beautiful, but I've seen you cry like this. Don't be selfish, give the character her own tears,'" Taylor-Joy recalled. "That had a profound effect on me. ... I'm sure people do it differently and every way is valid, but I can't cry as a character because of something that's happened to me. I have to cry from a place of empathy."

In building her cast, de Wilde worked to ensure everyone would be comfortable enough around one another to build the "library of passive aggressive behavior" that exists in Emma's world. She credits the final product to the actors' "abandonment of vanity," especially Taylor-Joy's.

"This story is called 'Emma,'" de Wilde said. "But if Anya Taylor-Joy hadn't been such an ensemble actor, this movie would never have worked. Although she's the most important character, she understood that Emma's nothing without these beautiful little characters that Jane Austen created."