We know Anya Taylor-Joy from her roles in Emma and The Witch, but her latest project has her embodying an entirely different character. The actress stars in The Queen’s Gambit, a new drama on Netflix about a young woman named Beth, a chess prodigy battling addiction issues while outsmarting her opponents in every match.

If you’ve already binged the series, which premiered on Netflix last Friday, you’ll know that Beth has a drug of choice: tiny green pills (and later, alcohol and other drugs). If you look a little closer, you can make out the name on the bottle, which is “xanzolam.” And before you head to WebMD, no, xanzolam is not a real drug. It exists only in The Queen’s Gambit universe, but we do know a little bit about what the fictional drug does.

Xanzolam is revealed to be a tranquilizer which is given to the children of Beth’s orphanage to keep them calm and easier to manage. Beth has been taking them at night like the other girls have told her to, which even helps her learn chess through hallucinations. But, she runs into a problem when the orphanage stops supplying them to the children after a law is passed that prohibits such drugs. At that point, her addiction has already set in, and Beth is desperate to get more of the pills, even breaking into the pharmacy to secure some.

So where did the idea for xanzolam come from? According to Newsweek, it’s likely the show’s take on real drugs like  librium or chlordiazepoxide. The latter is a benzodiazepine sedative that was introduced in the 1960s, when The Queen’s Gambit takes place. And in keeping with the show’s depiction of xanzolam, chlordiazepoxide was created in small green capsules and helped with anxiety, insomnia and withdrawal.

When the first episode of The Queen’s Gambit comes to a close, Beth has passed out after stealing the pills, possibly from an overdose. As Newsweek points out, a librium overdose can include symptoms like “sweating and chills, muscle tremors, fever, difficulty breathing, rashes, irregular heartbeats and seizures.” While xanzolam is the main drug featured in The Queen’s Gambit, the book that the show is based on makes multiple references to librium, including when Beth secures a bottle while in Mexico.

In an interview with Observer, Taylor-Joy explained how she portrayed her character’s addictions on the series. “Something I found interesting in my research with addiction is whatever it was the addict was using, at some point, it worked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it,” she explained. “Whatever it is, at some point, that substance was working. The difficulty with that is that people say addicts either end up in rehab, in jail or dead. There’s no way for it to be sustainable. Whatever that addiction is that you’ve been keeping, once that is thrown off, when it goes off the rails, that’s when you have to figure it out.”

Stream The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix

Source: NY Post