Taissa Farmiga, the actress who became a horror queen without ever becoming a horror fan

Taissa Farmiga

Photo: Greg2600 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 17, 1994 Readington Township, New Jersey, USA
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, The Mule, The Nun
Awards	SAG Award · Fright Meter Award nomination

The most disorienting thing about Taissa Farmiga’s career is not that she spent a decade making horror films she would never watch. It is that she was so convincing at it. Four seasons of American Horror Story, two installments of The Conjuring universe’s most profitable spinoff franchise — and in interviews, asked repeatedly about the genre that made her name, she kept saying the same thing: she does not like horror movies.

She grew up in Readington Township, New Jersey, youngest of seven children in a Ukrainian-American family where her older sister Vera was twenty-one years her senior and already working toward an Oscar nomination. Taissa had other plans — accounting, specifically — until Vera needed someone for Higher Ground, her directorial debut. The film premiered at Sundance in 2011. Taissa was fifteen, the reviews were kind, and before Higher Ground had left Park City, she had her first professional audition for a cable drama about a haunted house in Los Angeles.

She got the part on that audition. The character was Violet Harmon, a teenager who discovers, among other things, that she is dead. American Horror Story: Murder House became something of a cultural event in its first season, and Taissa Farmiga became its most visible young face — a quality of nervous intelligence contained within the screen that read differently from standard genre work. She returned for Coven two years later, playing Zoe Benson through thirteen episodes of witchcraft and power dynamics that made the season the most discussed of the anthology’s early run.

The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola‘s cool satirical piece about celebrity theft, appeared the same year — 2013 — and it suggested a register entirely different from the AHS brand. Farmiga was there too, in a smaller role but in a film that traveled to Cannes. The SXSW class of 2015 completed the picture: three films at once, all distinctly her own. The Final Girls, a meta-horror comedy that let her play with the genre from the inside. 6 Years, a drama directed by Hannah Fidell about the particular violence of a long relationship ending. Share, a short film about assault and its aftermath. Variety listed her among the breakout stars of the festival. The terms of her career had expanded.

Then The Nun arrived.

The 2018 film, directed by Corin Hardy, was a spinoff from The Conjuring 2 — a franchise in which Taissa’s sister Vera had been the anchor for years as paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren. Taissa played Sister Irene Palmer, a Catholic novitiate sent to investigate a demonic force in a Romanian convent. The Nun was not a critical triumph. But it was the highest-grossing film in the Conjuring series at the time of release, which meant it generated the commercial credibility that changes what producers think you can do — or rather, what they think you should do. The Nun II followed in 2023, with Sister Irene facing Valak again in postwar France.

This is where the contradiction sharpens. The role that turned her into a franchise asset was built on something she did not share with most of her audience: a personal investment in the genre. She does not watch horror films. She said so in interviews during The Nun press cycle, with the matter-of-factness of someone who had been saying it for years and found the surprise that followed it mildly exhausting. The fear she performed onscreen was a technical achievement, not a disposition she brought home.

What she brought home — or at least what she has been building toward — is Gladys Russell.

Since 2022, Farmiga has been the central young figure in HBO’s The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’s drama about the collision between old and new money in 1880s New York. Gladys is the daughter of Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), a woman who has engineered her family’s ascent into the highest reaches of society and intends to crown that ascent with the right marriage for her daughter. By Season 3, Gladys has been maneuvered into marrying the Duke of Buckingham — a match she resisted — and ended the season pregnant, a duchess in a world that gave women no exit from the choices made for them. The corset, Farmiga noted in interviews, functions as a constant physical reminder: the freedom that exists now did not exist for these women.

The Gilded Age earned its cast a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Outstanding Ensemble in 2023. More than that, it gave Farmiga a sustained character arc across multiple seasons — something her horror work, for all its volume, never quite provided. Gladys changes. She is not menaced; she is constrained, which is a different and arguably harder thing to play with conviction across three years of television.

Outside the prestige drama, Farmiga has continued to develop on parallel tracks: a stage debut in the 2016 off-Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child alongside Ed Harris; voice work as Raven across several DC animated films; and, coming into view now, the Ukrainian drama Anna, which she is executive producing as well as starring in. The film, directed by Dekel Berenson and inspired by his short that premiered at Cannes, is the most personally rooted project she has committed to publicly — a thread connecting her to a family heritage she grew up inside but at some remove from. Her parents immigrated from Ukraine. Her maternal grandparents met at Karlsfeld, a sub-camp of Dachau. She understands Ukrainian without speaking it fluently. The thread was always there.

What Taissa Farmiga is building, deliberately or otherwise, is a body of work that keeps outrunning the category it was assigned. The scream queen description was never wrong. It was just incomplete.