"How can someone so small cause so much trouble?" a character asks about the title character of Lucky, midway through the new Apple drama. The answer to that is simple: Lucky happens to be played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who more than makes up in charisma for whatever she lacks in mass.
Written by Jonathan Tropper (creator of Your Friends & Neighbors) and Silo's Cassie Pappas, and based on Marissa Stapley’s bestselling novel, Lucky casts the Queen's Gambit star as a con woman who is desperate to escape both the FBI and the gangsters from whom she and her husband Cary (Drew Starkey) have stolen a whole lot of money. Frequently alone, with her only help coming via phone calls with her imprisoned grifter dad John (Timothy Olyphant), Lucky nonetheless manages to evade, outwit, and even outfight her many pursuers.
Queen's Gambit was an interesting breakout project for Taylor-Joy. It was awkwardly-paced — like a lot of streaming miniseries, it had originally been developed as a movie, and felt like it — and was about chess, a subject which can be cinematic but isn't usually as commercially successful as it was here. But it also had Taylor-Joy, and it understood what a striking camera subject she is. It's not just that her eyes are roughly the size of gas giants. It's that she has an intense stillness to her, and a radiating intelligence, so that even when she's sitting at a chess table staring at the pieces — or, at times in that project, figuring out a game in her head with no board in sight — it's as riveting to look at as an action set-piece.