Author Marissa Stapley Knew Only Anya Taylor-Joy Could Play Lucky
8 min readIn 2020, not long after author Marissa Stapley finished writing a draft of her now bestselling novel, Lucky, she decided to watch the then-new Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit. The minute she saw actress Anya Taylor-Joy—who played the lead role of Beth Harmon, a girl who reinvents herself from an isolated, traumatized orphan to an independent, sensational world chess champion—appear on screen, Stapley turned to her husband and stated with conviction: “That’s Lucky.”
Lucky Armstrong is Stapley’s compelling con-artist protagonist, who works with her charismatic father, John, to swindle people out of progressively larger sums of money. In addition to the demands of her life as a grifter, Lucky grows increasingly vexed by the fact that her own backstory is as hollow as the aliases she inhabits. She knows nothing of her mother other than the odd snippets John begrudgingly tells her—mainly, that her mother abandoned the family when Lucky was a baby. The only remnant Lucky has of her mother is a 14-karat gold crucifix that she wears around her neck like a talisman.
In Stapley’s novel, when John gets mixed up working for a mafia maven named Priscilla—and Lucky’s own life becomes entwined with Priscilla’s son, Cary—their precarious situation grows all the more convoluted. Lucky and Cary eventually pull off a million-dollar heist, but Cary lands an emotional sucker punch when he takes off with their score and leaves Lucky behind, abandoned to flee the FBI on her own. Priscilla—who was supposed to get the stolen funds from Cary—is similarly blindsided, and thus she, too, is keen to track Lucky down. All the while, as the fervent need to locate her long-lost mother engulfs her even more, another Catch-22 presents itself: Lucky is in possession of a lottery ticket worth millions, but she can’t cash it in lest the FBI be alerted—and thus apprehend her.
As soon as the book was released in December 2021, it became a Reese’s Book Club pick. Shortly after that, Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s production company, moved to option the book. “I learned that pretty early, in the background of it being a Reese’s Pick, the people at Hello Sunshine were saying, ‘We have to turn this into a show,’” Stapley tells me via a Zoom call from her home in Toronto, where she also grew up.
As luck would have it, the Apple TV adaptation—an intense and fast-paced crime thriller television series that premiered with its first two episodes on July 15—has Taylor-Joy in the titular role. “She was the only actor even considered,” says Stapley, who says she also served as a producer for the series. Taylor-Joy, lauded for her ability to play diverse, complex, and distinct roles, seemed destined to play Lucky, a young woman on the run who has to revamp herself at every turn. “When she read the book, she immediately said, ‘I am Lucky,’” Stapley adds. “Everything fell into place.”
The seeds for Lucky were planted back when Stapley herself was only 10 years old. In 1987, Stapley’s mother, a 37-year-old single parent of two, was swindled out of $40,000—her entire life savings—by a pair of con artists in a Ponzi scheme. The thieves took off for the Cayman Islands and were never extradited. “I remember seeing my mother sitting on the stairs, crying,” Stapley says. “It’s a core memory of mine.”
Her mother was the kind of person to put the past behind her and move on. “That’s how she operated,” Stapley says. “I do remember things being tight for a while, but she was the absolute embodiment of ‘Keep calm and carry on.’” Instead of dwelling on the disaster, Stapley’s mother poured her energy into a kind of re-emergence of self. “My mom was a real estate agent; she worked, she hustled,” says Stapley. “But after what happened, she got her grief certification and became a grief counselor. She had to reinvent herself.”
Growing up, Stapley says her mother never talked about the financial scam. It was only later, as an adult, that Stapley asked her about it. “I said to her: ‘Am I remembering it correctly that this happened to you?’” Her mother confirmed the memory. “When people are conned, there’s such shame attached to it,” Stapley continues. “It’s the sad reality of why people don’t seek help—because they think they feel it was their mistake and their foolishness. It’s the ‘How could I have fallen for it?’ mentality. It was totally unfair that they had gotten away with it.”
Still, it wasn’t until the winter of 2019—right around the time her mother was diagnosed with colorectal cancer—that Stapley took this experience and realized she could make a novel from it. Stapley was on her way to go skiing in New York with her family when inspiration struck. She was in the car listening to the radio, and the morning DJs were talking about a massive lottery payment in the state that had been unclaimed and was about to expire the following day. “Authors are like magpies,” she explains with a laugh. “You’re always looking for a story.”
Marissa Stapley.
The DJs were discussing reasons why a ticket might go unclaimed. “Some examples were like, ‘Maybe the person lost the ticket,’ or ‘maybe they died,’” Stapley recalls. And then one of the DJs said something especially interesting: “‘Maybe the ticket holder was wanted for a crime, and that’s why they couldn’t come forward.’”
As intriguing as that idea was, Stapley wasn’t interested in writing about a criminal. “I don’t love the experience of following along with someone who is compelling but ultimately unredeemable,” she explains. “That’s just not my sweet spot.” There was another reason to shelve the idea, at least for the time being: “I was already deeply into working on [her 2024 novel] The Lightning Bottles.”
But as her mother’s cancer took over more of Stapley’s own life, she couldn’t wrap her head around The Lightning Bottles’ two protagonists and their tragic lives. It was too complicated to decipher their twin stories amidst her own family crisis. As her mom’s illness progressed, she would ask Stapley how The Lightning Bottles was coming along. Stapley would tell her not to worry about it—that she would request a deadline extension from her publisher.
But her mother’s love was like a “velvet hammer,” as Stapley calls it, insisting that she not give up her work in the midst of her preemptive grieving. On top of everything else, she wasn’t about to watch her daughter derail her career—even if she didn’t know that part of the problem was that Stapley was torn between two books.
One day, Stapley was on the bus on her way to see her mother. “I don’t know what happened, but it was like Lucky came and sat down beside me,” she says. “It was as if Lucky was saying: ‘Here I am. I’m totally alone. Just focus on me.’”
Suddenly, Stapley was firing off text messages to her agent. “‘Here’s an idea. It’s about a girl named Lucky. She’s a con artist…’” she typed furiously. “It was like a creative download.”
She knew starting a new project was a crazy thing to do: Her agent could have easily argued that Stapley already had 40,000 words of the other novel in the works, and there her focus should remain. Instead, the message that came through was: “‘This is the best idea you’ve ever had. Drop everything and do it.’”
Although the creators of the Apple adaptation kept the book’s core plot intact, Stapley has no qualms with the changes that were made. She doesn’t believe that a good screen adaptation has to be entirely loyal to its source material. Instead, it can be a reimagining of it. “The book is just a launching pad,” she says. She’s found that, in her own anecdotal observations, romance readers especially tend to get upset when a show or movie isn’t totally accurate to the book it’s based upon. “But that’s like adapting with your hands tied,” Stapley argues. “Books are books, and there’s a lot of interiority and things happen on the page. But they’re not going to happen on screen.”
When Hello Sunshine took on the Lucky adaptation, Stapley placed all her trust in the creative team, including showrunner Jonathan Tropper and programming exec Ali Woodruff. “There are some notable plot differences that I knew about,” she says. “And I did feel nervous going into watching the episodes because I wondered if I might feel disconnected. Is it going to feel like it’s mine? It’s a trust fall, and that’s okay. You have to give it your blessing and let go.”
Timothy Olyphant and Taylor-Joy in Lucky.
Ultimately, she found the characters and emotional elements she saw on screen were familiar to her. “They will also be recognizable to fans of this book,” Stapley emphasizes. “I feel like Lucky is a companion novel to the series—almost like a prequel.” Although the dual timeline present in the book was not replicated in the show, Stapley tells me the creative team did use some key scenes from Lucky’s origin story and hired a child actor to play the younger Lucky. Stapley is exceptionally satisfied with how the series was ultimately executed, and she teases that the ending made her especially emotional. “It was so perfect, and so true to what Lucky seeks in both the book and the show: freedom and a new beginning.”
Stapley spent a week and a half on set—part of which she spent with Witherspoon herself—and got to watch the final two episodes as they filmed. Her appreciation for the team behind the Lucky adaptation extends to the cast, including the incomparable Annette Bening—who plays Priscilla, a mob boss and also Cary’s mother. Like Taylor-Joy, Bening was in Stapley’s head right from the beginning, but she envisioned the actress not as Priscilla but as Gloria, John’s estranged wife (whom Lucky, for a time, believed could be her mother). But when she was ultimately cast as Priscilla, Bening ran with the role.
Stapley feels that although she planted the seeds about Priscilla, it was Bening who understood her at a more visceral level. “I didn’t think about Priscilla as much as Annette did,” Stapley says. “Her involvement with the mafia and what it’s like to be a woman in that role—she just elevated the role to an extreme, complex, and fascinating character who I would love to spend more time with and have a deeper understanding of as an author.” Stapley feels that although she’s the one who created Priscilla, it was Bening who grasped her at a more visceral level.
Stapley and Hayley Wright, Taylor-Joy’s stunt double in Lucky.
Since the series wrapped production, Stapley has submitted a first draft of her follow-up to Lucky, currently titled No Such Thing as Lucky, slated to come out in the fall of 2027. “I aligned Lucky’s world to the show a bit more,” she says of the sequel. “I had to take everything away from her, which was sad, but kind of great to get her on the run again.”
To fans of the original Lucky, it should come as no surprise that, in No Such Thing, Lucky once again has to reinvent herself. “She has to do that in a really big way,” Stapley confirms. No matter how much she transforms herself, Lucky will always represent how Stapley’s mother taught her how to live. “We can be victims of our circumstances because hard things happen, but that doesn’t have to define us,” she says. “We can always reimagine ourselves and still strive for greatness even within those circumstances.”
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