Anya Taylor-Joy thought she'd never work again after watching herself in The Witch

Anya Taylor-Joy has been in every kind of movie you can imagine: M. Night Shyamalan thrillers, period dramas, superhero flicks, supernatural horrors, children’s movies… the list goes on. And all of that doesn’t even include the fact that she starred in one of Netflix’s biggest recent series, The Queen’s Gambit. But Taylor-Joy didn’t expect to become one of Hollywood’s top young actors. In fact, she thought her acting career would be cut short.

In an interview, The Hollywood Reporter asks the actor what it was like seeing herself on the big screen playing her first major role in Robert Eggers’ The Witch. “Rob showed us the film maybe two hours before the audience screening, and I was devastated,” she admits. “I thought I’d never work again, I still get shivers thinking about it. It was just the worst feeling of, ‘I have let down the people I love most in the world. I didn’t do it right.’ And I’m quite verbose, I like to talk, I like to communicate. I did not talk, I just cried. I couldn’t handle seeing my face that large.”

She also discusses feeling anxious about accepting her role in the latest adaptation of Emma. “I got Jane Austen’s Emma as a job, and that really panicked me, because it was a role that was supposed to be beautiful from the offset, and I hadn’t done that—I’d played creatures, outsiders, whatever. For some reason I guess that triggered some childhood trauma and I was like, ‘I can’t do it. There’s no way, I’m going to really let people down,’” she says.

But Taylor-Joy didn’t let anyone down. If anything, she keeps nabbing major roles. She’s set to star in the untitled David O. Russell film alongside plenty of A-listers, like Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and Robert De Niro. And she’s a top Emmy contender for her role in Queen’s Gambit. So hey, stars are insecure as hell just like us—just with a lot more money, of course.