“I’d never done a film before, so it was all very, very new. There was just a lot that I simply didn’t know,” Foy recalls. “What are you supposed to do as an actor? How do you interact with the crew? How does it all come together? Because there’s hundreds of people, a part of a crew, and everybody is trying to tell the same story.”
It was a fitting project for a fan of the fantasy genre. Foy’s family read The Lord of the Rings to her when she was a kid, which she then read herself several times over. At 14, four years after her role in Breaking Dawn, she began collecting first editions of fantasy novels. The Throne of Glass series by Sara J. Maas, which she recommends before reading A Court of Thorns and Roses or Crescent City, is her favorite. She read each book as it was published, hiding them inside her history textbooks during schooling hours on sets. In addition to the aforementioned Teen Wolf, Supernatural and Gilmore Girls were also among the actor’s first true loves.
Foy is also, it must be said, an unabashed “horse girl.” She always felt a strong connection with horses, but after starring in Black Beauty in 2020, they became her greatest passion. She purchased her draft horse, a big work horse named “Don,” after the film, and recently rescued and rehabilitated a wild Mustang named “Whisper.” Her connection with these animals has led her to become a vocal advocate for the passage of the SAFE Act, protecting horses from slaughter, as part of her work with the Wild Beauty Foundation.
This is all to say that Foy knows what it is to be a fan in the truest sense. To have it consume you and dictate your choices. Given her closeness to the subject matter, she is not a typical Twilight fan, but those stories have changed her life nonetheless. “Some of the people who’ve been fans since Twilight have been following [my career]. I’ve seen them grow up online too,” Foy says. “We’ve all kind of grown and evolved together, and that’s really cool.”