Queen’s Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy reveals she can make her nose bleed on cue

Actor surprised herself and her co-stars with strange skill on set of Emma

Anya Taylor-Joy, the star of The Queen’s Gambit and Emma, has revealed she can make her nose bleed on queue.

In the recent adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, which came out in February, Taylor-Joy played the eponymous matchmaker.

One scene in the film sees Emma suffer a sudden nosebleed in an emotional moment, and Taylor-Joy somehow managed to start bleeding from her nostril right on cue.

The original plan had been to cut the scene and add the fake blood under Taylor-Joy’s nose, but as she told The Guardian in a new interview, there was no intervention necessary.

“I didn’t know I had that talent until that scene,” said Taylor-Joy. “As soon as my nose started bleeding, [director] Autumn de Wilde and Johnny [Flynn, who played Mr Knightley] both got as excited as me. The crew were going, ‘Cut, cut!’ because they were concerned about me but us three were like: ‘What are you talking about? Keep rolling! This is unbelievable! We have to capture it on film.’”

She added: “I always joke that I’m like Liam Neeson in Taken in that I have a very particular set of skills that would render me useless anywhere else other than in the acting world.”

The Independent’s critic Clarisse Loughrey gave Emma four stars, writing that, while it was “hardly revolutionary”, it was nevertheless a “decadent, fondant-swaddled delight”.

Taylor-Joy also recently appeared in The Queen’s Gambit, which is available on Netflix now. The show recently broke a Netflix record with more than 62 million household views in a month.