The Miniaturist: Why Anya Taylor-Joy's Forgotten BBC Gem Deserves Your Weekend
TL;DR: Before The Queen's Gambit made Anya Taylor-Joy a household name, she delivered a quietly extraordinary performance in The Miniaturist, a two-part BBC/PBS period drama set in 17th-century Amsterdam. It's under three hours total, it's streaming now on multiple platforms outside India, and it's one of the most undervalued pieces of television from the past decade.
If you're streaming anywhere outside the UK and US, there's a decent chance The Miniaturist never crossed your radar. That's the real loss here.
A performance that should have accelerated Anya Taylor-Joy's trajectory by two years got buried under PBS scheduling and BBC iPlayer geography, and most of the world simply missed it. Then The Queen's Gambit dropped in 2020, Taylor-Joy became a phenomenon overnight, and The Miniaturist quietly stayed in the shadows. I hear from people who follow Taylor-Joy obsessively that they didn't know this show even existed until they'd already watched Furiosa twice. That's a shame, and it's fixable.
Where to stream it right now, and what you're actually watching
Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Petronella "Nella" Oortman, a young woman in 17th-century Amsterdam married off to wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt to clear her family's debts. Standard period-drama setup, except it isn't.
The show aired as two feature-length episodes in December 2017—roughly 55 minutes each, so just under two hours total. That's a weekend watch, not a commitment. Adapted from Jessie Burton's bestselling 2014 novel, it's a BBC One and PBS Masterpiece co-production directed by Guillem Morales, who brings a Gothic visual language to the Amsterdam interiors that makes the whole thing feel less like a costume drama and more like a slow-burn psychological thriller.
Where to find it:
- UK: BBC iPlayer (free with TV licence)
- US: PBS Passport / Masterpiece on Amazon Prime Video
- Australia: BritBox
- Spain, India, and most other regions: Currently unavailable on major streaming platforms
Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker updates as licensing windows shift, so it's worth checking if you're in a region not listed above. These deals change faster than streaming services update their catalogues.
Why it matters now: The Lucky premiere effect
Apple TV+ launches Lucky on July 15, 2026—a crime thriller starring Taylor-Joy alongside Annette Bening and Timothy Olyphant. This isn't a small project. Reese Witherspoon's production company is involved. Jonathan Tropper (Weekends) created it. The full Apple promotional machinery will be behind it.
The Miniaturist is the ideal pre-watch. Not as homework, but because it shows you a version of Taylor-Joy doing something her bigger roles haven't always required: quiet, constrained, interior work. Everything she does in The Queen's Gambit—that coiled intelligence, the way she holds information behind her eyes—you can see her rehearsing it here. Most coverage of Taylor-Joy's career draws a straight line from Split to Queen's Gambit to Furiosa, as if the trajectory was pure blockbuster escalation; what that framing misses is that The Miniaturist is the only project in her filmography where she's asked to carry a prestige drama almost entirely through reaction shots and silence, and it's the performance that most clearly predicts what she'll bring to Lucky. Watch them in that order and tell me the connection isn't there.
What actually happens in the story
Nella arrives at her husband's Amsterdam townhouse expecting a conventional marriage. What she finds instead is a household full of secrets, a husband who barely speaks to her, and a mysterious miniaturist—a craftsperson who creates dollhouse figures—who seems to know details about Nella's life that no one should know.
The thing nobody mentions is how much Taylor-Joy does with her face in this show, particularly in the second episode when Nella begins to understand the true nature of her husband's household. There's a specific scene where she's handed the first miniature figure and her expression moves through confusion, unease, and something close to recognition in about four seconds of screen time. No dialogue. Just her face.
Romola Garai plays Marin Brandt, Johannes's sister—arguably the show's most complicated character. Her performance is equally worth watching for. Christopher Obi as Otto, a character whose storyline gives the show much of its moral weight, and Alex Hassell as Johannes himself (a genuinely difficult role handled with real restraint).
The source material and why it inspired a BBC adaptation
Jessie Burton's novel was itself inspired by a real object: a 17th-century dollhouse owned by a historical Petronella Oortman, which still sits in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. Burton borrowed the name and the dollhouse as a starting point, then built an entirely fictional story around them.
The novel spent over 20 weeks on the UK bestseller lists after its July 2014 publication, was translated into 38 languages, and sold over a million copies worldwide before the BBC adaptation even entered pre-production. That existing readership is partly why the BBC greenlit the adaptation. The production premiered on December 26–27, 2017, the coveted Boxing Day and bank-holiday slots that the BBC reserves for prestige programming. That's not nothing. The BBC doesn't hand those windows to projects it doesn't believe in (the same slots have previously gone to Great Expectations, Dracula, and Les Misérables).
The show holds a 74% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which, given how little marketing attention it's received since 2017, suggests genuine word-of-mouth staying power rather than promotional noise.
Similar shows you've probably watched (and how they compare)
If you liked any of these, The Miniaturist is a near-certain watch:
- Alias Grace (CBC/Netflix, 2017) — Sarah Polley's adaptation of Margaret Atwood. Same DNA: period drama, woman in constrained domestic situation, feminist subtext, something darker lurking beneath the surface.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (BBC, 2015) — Demonstrates the BBC's appetite for ambitious period fantasy-adjacent drama.
- The White Princess (Starz, 2017) — Strong period-drama audience; boosted lead actress Jodie Comer's profile pre-Killing Eve.
Alias Grace is the closest match in spirit. Both reward patience. Both use a woman's constrained world as a lens for something psychologically complex. Both are based on acclaimed literary source material that already had a fanbase before the adaptation aired.
Why Indian audiences are getting left out
Here's the blunt truth: Indian streaming subscribers are missing this one. The Miniaturist is currently unavailable on Netflix India, Amazon Prime Video India, Disney+ Hotstar, JioCinema, SonyLIV, or Zee5. That's a comprehensive absence for a show that, given its literary pedigree and the size of Taylor-Joy's Indian fanbase post-Queen's Gambit, should logically have found a home somewhere.
The BBC/PBS rights structure is part of the problem. Co-productions from this era were licensed territory by territory with limited windows. Streaming rights for older BBC content don't always travel to South Asian markets. Hard to say if that changes, but with Taylor-Joy's profile about to spike again when Lucky hits Apple TV+ in July 2026, the word on the lot is that there's a commercial argument for someone to acquire Indian streaming rights before that moment. Though that part is still rumour—from what I gather, no deal is close.
For now, Indian viewers wanting to watch The Miniaturist are looking at VPN-assisted BBC iPlayer access or international Amazon Prime subscriptions. Neither is ideal. Movie OTT's regional tracker keeps tabs on licensing shifts across Indian platforms, so it's worth bookmarking if you're waiting for a legitimate local option.
The Indian appetite for British period drama is documented and real. Downton Abbey built a genuine following here. The Crown did the same. The Miniaturist fits that profile exactly. Someone is leaving money on the table.
What Taylor-Joy has said about the role
Speaking to the BBC's promotional team during the show's original run, Taylor-Joy said she found Nella's journey from passivity to self-determination the most compelling aspect of the character: "She arrives thinking she knows what her life is going to be, and then everything she assumed is stripped away. What's left is who she actually is."
That's the performance you're watching for. That moment when assumption collapses and something harder emerges underneath.
What to do next
Check Movie OTT for your region's current availability. If you're in the UK, it's free on iPlayer. If you're in the US, grab a PBS Passport subscription or search Amazon Prime Video. If you're in Australia, BritBox has it.
Then watch The Miniaturist before Lucky lands in July. Two hours. One weekend. You'll see where Taylor-Joy's real work begins.
