Harry Potter is the gift that keeps on giving.
During a virtual interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers on Nov. 12, The Queen's Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy—who's first language is Spanish—shared a fun fact about her English education.
"My uncles taught me to read and to speak at the same time with the Harry Potter books," she confessed to host Seth Meyers. "I was such an annoying child, like, God bless my parents. It means that I was either casting spells continuously or using very annoying words. Like, I was such a precocious, annoying little kid. It's like, ‘Mommy I cleaned the dishes meticulously.' You know that kind of thing."
The young actress, who starred in the 2015 supernatural horror film The Witch, also discussed the reality of playing a chess prodigy on Netflix's hit show The Queen's Gambit, in comparison to learning the complicated game for real. Spoiler: It wasn't easy.
"I had this wonderful idea that I was going to get fantastic at chess and you know, it was going to be my superpower forever," the 24-year-old recalled. "But the reality was that I was working back to back and so I just had to kind of give myself to it and learn as much as I could."
She continued, "I had to learn, like, understand chess for myself because I felt that people care about it so much that I couldn't just show up and not understand the theory of it. But the theory and then applying that theory are two very different things."
The Queen's Gambit is now streaming on Netflix.