Anya Taylor-Joy to return to Netflix roots with How To Kill Your Family adaptation
Anya Taylor-Joy is going back to her roots. While the star has found big-screen success recently in films like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Menu, The Northman, and that one 30-second scene in Dune: Part Two, she's set a new project that will take her back to Netflix, the platform that launched her into the stratosphere in 2020 with The Queen's Gambit.
Taylor-Joy is set to star in an adaptation of Bella Mackie's pointedly titled 2021 novel, How To Kill Your Family. It's unclear as of this writing if the show will use the exact same name, but considering series with titles like End Of The F***ing World and I Am Not Okay With This, it does seem right up Netflix's alley. Mackie will serve as a co-executive producer on the eight-episode series, alongside lead writer, Emma Moran, Taylor-Joy under LadyKiller, and Sid Gentle Films Ltd, which also produced Killing Eve.
Per Tudum, How To Kill Your Family "follows Grace (Taylor-Joy), who has a complicated family. Her dad is Simon Artemis, a billionaire and ruthless social climber. Grace is the product of an affair Simon claims not to remember, which left Grace and her mom to fend for themselves. When her mother dies and Grace is rejected by the people who should love her, she transforms her anger into something useful—killing off her estranged extended family via morbidly creative means. Soon, Grace is clawing her way toward revenge and a hefty inheritance. But her mission pulls her away from what she really needs."
We arguably haven't had a really great "morbidly creative" murderer show since Hannibal, so this premise is certainly intriguing. It also sounds a bit like Sweetpea, another forthcoming British series led by rising star Ella Purnell. "As soon as I turned the last page, I knew I had to be a part of bringing this story to life," Taylor-Joy said in a statement. "After some (light) stalking of the inimitable Bella Mackie, I could not be more thrilled to be collaborating with the team… I am looking forward to getting our hands even dirtier."
Taylor-Joy "is the most perfect fit to play Grace,” Mackie said in her own statement. “I often think she understands her better than I do."