Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kids: Everything They’ve Said About Parenting

Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson have their hands full with four daughters.

Two years after the couple met while working on Sam’s directorial debut Nowhere Boy, they welcomed their first daughter together, Wylda Rae, in 2010. Romy Hero joined the family in 2012 and Sam and Aaron got married later that year. Aaron is also a stepfather to Sam’s older daughters, Angelica and Jessie Phoenix, whom she shares with her ex-husband Jay Jopling.

Although Aaron is a movie star, known for his roles in Kick-Ass, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Bullet Train, and Sam is a successful director with several credits to her name, the pair have said they prefer a quiet life in England. They prioritize spending quality time with their children above all else.

During an August 2023 interview with Esquire, the Kraven the Hunter star explained that he doesn’t enjoy filming back-to-back projects that keep him away from home as the small moments with his daughters are what he values most in life.

​​”I enjoy the normality of things, the everyday stuff,” he told the outlet. “Getting my kids ready in the mornings, taking them to school and activities — that’s plenty. That feeds my soul.” Of his decision to turn down major blockbuster roles early on in his career, he said: “I wanted, purely, to be with my babies … I didn’t want to be taken away from them.”

Aaron and Sam rarely share photos of their daughters or speak about them publicly. However, they have shared some sweet anecdotes about the girls over the years, as well as insight into their parenting style.

Here’s everything to know about Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s four kids.

They welcomed daughters Wylda in 2010 and Romy in 2012

Sam and Aaron had a whirlwind romance, meeting in 2008 and getting engaged exactly one year later. On July 8, 2010, they welcomed their first child, daughter Wylda Rae. After confirming they were expecting their second child in 2011, their daughter Romy Hero was born on Jan. 18, 2012.

Prior to their births, Aaron said he was already well prepared to step into fatherhood as he had taken on an active role in Sam’s older daughters’ lives.

“It’s not scary,” Aaron told PEOPLE in 2010. “I’m already a stepdad to [Angelica and Jessie] anyway. So the nerves have sort of gone.”

He added of Sam: “I’ve got a wonderful woman … She’s lovely and she’s a fantastic mother.”

Aaron said he always knew he’d be a young father

The Anna Karenina actor was just 20 years old when he and Sam welcomed Wylda. However, as he told Esquire in 2023, he had known since he was 10 or 11 that he wanted to start a family and would become a dad sooner rather than later.

“I was going to have a big family,” he told the outlet. “I knew I was going to be a young father. I knew I was going to have many kids.”

Sam told The Sunday Times in 2017 that although her husband is 23 years her junior, he has an “old soul,” which perhaps lent itself to fatherhood.

“My friends call him Benjamin Button because he has — on the outside — such youth, and on the inside, he is so wise and settled,” she said of Aaron. “He likes being at home and cooking for the family. He likes walking the dogs. He loves his chickens — he collects the eggs and makes breakfast for everyone.”

They keep their children out of the spotlight

Sam and Aaron have said they prefer to be a private couple and are especially protective of their children’s position out of the spotlight. They rarely speak about them during interviews and don’t share photos of them online.

“We live behind walls,” Aaron told Harper’s Bazaar in 2019. “Literally, figuratively, and deliberately. You’ll never see our children or any of our most personal moments on social media or in the press. We have our professional lives and our life together, and we keep them apart.”

However, after his eldest daughters turned 18, Aaron began posting about Angelica and Jessie on rare occasions. “Still my babygirl,” he wrote alongside a photo with Jessie on her 18th birthday in October 2024.

As for Angelica, she has her own Instagram account where she showcases her work as an art exhibitor and actress.

In 2017, after Aaron won a Golden Globe for his supporting role in Nocturnal Animals, Angelica shared a photo of her and her stepdad, captioned, “I am SO proud,” along with several trophy emojis.

She’s also shared several photos of her and her mom, including various throwback shots and a March 2022 post announcing a collaboration she and Sam worked on for HUMANITY magazine.

Family is Aaron’s main priority

Despite his successful acting career, Aaron has said he is always more focused on his family. In his 2023 interview with Esquire, Aaron explained that when his kids were younger, he only filmed one movie a year in order to spend more time at home with his daughters.

The Godzilla star has been implementing this work-life balance since his daughters Wylda and Romy were born.

“My whole thing, my priority, is my family, my kids and my wife. That’s my future. I don’t really care about what role is next,” he said in a 2013 interview with The Independent.

“I’m not attached to things, I don’t have that ambitious thing that most actors my age have,” he explained. “I don’t live to act, to go from job to job … I live for my wife and my kids and I wake up to them and that’s what I enjoy.”

Aaron went on to describe having his daughters as “the most wonderful thing” and said: “It’s indescribable and beautiful. It’s humbling and grounding.”

They take turns staying home with the kids

Since both Sam and Aaron work in the entertainment industry, the couple devised a system of switching off who stays at home with the children so they can each film their respective projects.

“We have a nanny, but we don’t have an army. The nice thing is that I’ll take the job on and Sam will step back and vice versa, so you know there’s always a parent around,” Aaron told The Independent in 2013.

According to his wife, while Sam was directing Fifty Shades of Grey, Aaron stayed at home with the kids and seemingly enjoyed being on dad duty.

“The great thing about Aaron is that he’s happy not working and being at home with the kids while I work,” Sam told The Guardian during a 2015 interview. “He’s like, ‘No no, I like being an at-home dad, doing the cooking and the school runs.’ ”

She continued, “What happens next depends on what comes up, on whether Aaron decides to do another blockbuster or an independent movie.”

Aaron coached his daughter’s basketball team

When Aaron isn’t starring on the big screen, he picks up other jobs, like coaching his daughter’s basketball team, as he explained on Live with Kelly and Ryan in 2019.

“It was one of those things where parents could volunteer and I said ‘Yeah I’d love to,’ ” he said on the talk show. “They went, ‘Great so you’re the coach.’ ”

Despite never playing basketball before and the team losing every game during the regular season, Aaron said the girls had a bit of a comeback during the playoffs.

Another hobby Aaron has picked up for his children is carpentry; he even built them a treehouse at the request of his youngest, as he told James Corden during a 2018 appearance on The Late Late Show.

“My daughter, she’s 6 years old and she’s smart. She goes, ‘Dad you’re going to build me a treehouse,’ ” Aaron explained. “It’s already pretty much done and it looks more like a guest house, it’s massive.”

Their daughters love spending time in the outdoors

In a March 2022 conversation with Andrew Garfield for HERO magazine, Aaron opened up about his family’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic and praised his daughters for their “adaptability” when adjusting to remote learning.

He went on to explain that at the beginning of the lockdown, he and Sam took their children further outside of Los Angeles — where they were currently living at the time.

“[We] decided to get out of town, to get into nature a little bit. I could see that remote learning was just a lot, and obviously there was a lot of news and I think [looking out for] mental health was a big part of survival,” he said.

Aaron added, “We’ve been here [in California] for eight years and not got a surfboard and jumped in the ocean.” But the pandemic changed that for his family and his daughters started to surf. “My girls took to it really quickly, they’re great surfers,” Aaron said.

The lockdown strengthened the English couple’s desire to move home and the family relocated to Somerset in 2022, per Esquire, where they have plenty of animals on their countryside property, including pigs and bees.