Celebrity
Anya Taylor-Joy Learned English By Watching Jack Black’s School Of Rock
The Super Mario Bros. star also picked up the language from Jumanji and the Harry Potter films.
Anya Taylor-Joy learned English at the School of Rock. The Golden Globe winner, who voices Princess Peach in 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, revealed in an interview with BuzzFeed UK that when she moved from Argentina to London at age 6, she picked up on the language thanks to several movies — including her Mario Bros. co-star Jack Black’s School of Rock. “At the school I went to when I first moved to London they would play School of Rock every Friday,” Taylor-Joy, whose first language is Spanish, said. “At that time, I didn’t really speak much English, if any, so that and Harry Potter and Jumanji are like how I learned English,” Fans may recall that she famously kicked off her 2021 Saturday Night Live hosting gig in her native language.
Getting to meet Black while doing the Mario Bros. press tour was exciting for the Queen’s Gambit star since they didn’t record their voice work for the film together. “I didn’t realize I was going to be doing the press day for this movie with Jack Black, so when I read that, the sound that came out of me was just this high pitch shriek that I was not expecting,” Taylor-Joy said. “We haven’t met each other because we all recorded our parts individually, so I was super starstruck when I saw the schedule for today.”
She also admitted to fangirling about his comedy rock duo Tenacious D, whose song “Tribute” is a karaoke favorite of hers. “I very seldom get like that, but I was just running around earlier like, ‘Oh my God, Tenacious D, this is amazing.’”
In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Black’s Bowser sings a dramatic song about Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach called “Peaches,” which is already drawing Oscar buzz.
Taylor-Joy previously told Wall Street Journal about growing up in Argentina and then relocating to the United Kingdom. In Argentina, she recalled that there was “Lots of horseriding, lots of animals.” She described moving to London as traumatic. “All of a sudden I was in this intense big city,” she remembered. Taylor-Joy also admitted that she thought her family would move back to South America, so she initially “refused to learn English” because of this.
