Taylor Russell

Taylor Russell McKenzie (born July 18, 1994) is a Canadian actress and filmmaker who has become one of the most closely watched performers of her generation. After early minor roles, she broke through as Judy Robinson on Netflix’s Lost in Space (2018–2021), then detonated expectations with back-to-back triumphs in Waves (2019) and Bones and All (2022) — the latter earning her the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was raised across Canada — Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. She began acting professionally in the early 2010s, appearing in television movies like Pants on Fire (2014) alongside Bradley Steven Perry and Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Blink, a CBS TV movie with Madeline Carroll.

Her first major role was Judy Robinson, the eldest Robinson daughter, in Netflix’s reimagining of Lost in Space — 28 episodes across three seasons from 2018 to 2021. The part made her recognizable to a global audience and earned her a Saturn Award nomination, but it was only the setup.

In 2019 she played Emily in Trey Edward Shults’s Waves, the second half of an A24 family drama — a performance critics described as raw, heartbreaking and entirely without vanity. It announced an actor operating at the highest level: the rare breakout that instantly rearranged industry expectations.

She also carried the horror franchise entry Escape Room (2019) as Zoey Davis, returning for Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021). Then came Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All (2022), a cannibal romance in which she starred as Maren opposite Timothée Chalamet — holding the center of an auteur’s strangest vision and winning the Marcello Mastroianni Award, Venice’s prize for the festival’s best emerging actor.

From 2023 to 2024 she performed onstage in the play The Effect. Behind the camera, she co-directed, wrote and produced the 2020 short documentary The Heart Still Hums with Savanah Leaf — a film that became the basis for Leaf’s feature Earth Mama (2023). She has also become a fashion-world fixture: a model for Loewe, Chanel and Prada and a cover star for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, cited as a style inspiration by a generation of young stars.

Recent credits include Maya in Words on Bathroom Walls (2020) and Bella in Mother, Couch (2024), with the 2026 film Hope on the horizon. Few actors of her age combine mainstream recognition, art-house credibility and a director’s eye — which is exactly why the industry keeps betting on her.

Russell’s ascent has played out as much on red carpets and runways as on screens. She has become a genuine fashion-world figure — front-row at the major houses, a campaign face for Loewe, Chanel and Prada, and a cover star for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar — the rare young actor whose style influence is discussed in the same breath as her performances. But the throughline of every choice, from the A24 drama to the Venice competition slot to the London stage, is control: she picks projects the way directors pick films, not the way brands pick ambassadors. That instinct is why, at barely thirty, she is already spoken of as a future filmmaker rather than just a star.

Taylor Russell’s breakout in Waves (2019) was the kind of performance that rearranges an actor’s future: raw, heartbreaking, and completely without vanity, it announced a talent operating at the highest level. She followed it with Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance opposite Timothée Chalamet, proving she could hold the center of an auteur’s strangest vision. Before all that she was Judy Robinson on Netflix’s Lost in Space — the sci-fi gig that made her famous while she was becoming something else entirely.

That something else is a filmmaker, too. The Heart Still Hums, the short documentary she co-directed, became the basis for a feature — and it suggests where this career is going: not just great performances but authorship. She’s one of the few young actors with both the industry’s trust and a director’s curiosity.

Every choice since Waves has been interesting. That’s the tell of an actor playing the long game.