Furiosa Star Anya Taylor-Joy Didn't Talk To Charlize Theron Until Filming Was Done
George Miller's upcoming postapocalyptic car chase movie "Furiousa: A Mad Max Saga" serves as a prequel to his 2015 actioner "Mad Max: Fury Road." In the 2015 film, Charlize Theron played Imperator Furiosa, a robot-armed truck driver who rescues a group of women from sexual enslavement. This new film is an origin story set about 20 years before the events of "Fury Road" wherein Anya Taylor-Joy plays the young Furiosa, who is kidnapped from her blissful childhood in the Green Place and held captive by a vicious gang called the Biker Horde. Both films are set in the futuristic car-centric Australian desert wastelands first conceived by Miller in 1979's "Mad Max," with "Furiosa" marking the fifth film in the "Mad Max" franchise overall.
Taylor-Joy, in wanting to keep her performance free from influence, deliberately didn't speak to Theron during production. Taylor-Joy had seen "Fury Road," of course, and revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that the plot of "Furiosa" leads almost directly into the events of its predecessor. As such, she carefully studied the first few minutes of "Fury Road" with great intensity, hoping to match her performance in Miller's new film with Theron's original turn.
Theron, however, had already depicted Furiosa with her own distinct idiom, and Taylor-Joy didn't want to be unduly influenced. Taylor-Joy, it seems, is an actor who operates by instinct and doesn't want said instincts bound by another performer's insights. As such, she only conferred with Theron after shooting on "Furiosa" had finished.
Taylor-Joy was focused on the story in Furiosa
Of course, as soon as filming on "Furiosa" was over, Taylor-Joy ran to Theron, merely because she admired her. In her own words:
"You have to go on your own journey with it. [...] But as soon as it was done, I reached out to her because I'm such a fan, not only of her as an actress but her as a person. And she's as wonderful and cool as you could possibly hope, and really supportive and classy, so I appreciated it."
A sequel is always going to be better if it can tell its own story without the context of the original. Audiences should be able to connect to a movie without pre-existing knowledge, pretense, or affection for the characters. Taylor-Joy seems to have understood that, saying that she wanted to "tell the story of the person in this script." This wasn't the story of Theron's Furiosa, but a new story with a new Furiosa. It's worth noting that the previous films in the "Mad Max" series tend to mutate quickly, hastily abandoning direct connections. Miller has even said that the "Mad Max" movies are not literal transcriptions of real events, but fables told by post-apocalyptic bards, all of them singing their own versions of a long-dead hero named Mad Max. This would explain why Max changes ages, or why different villains are never mentioned after their overthrow.
Taylor-Joy admitted that her role isn't very dialogue-heavy and that her performance had to be, for long portions, wholly physical. "It ended up being something that only gave me, for a large portion of the movie, my eyes to telegraph the story," she explained, admitting it was rather frightening as an actor.
Her character's journey will be made clear when "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" hits theaters on May 24, 2024.