Anya Taylor-Joy
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Anya Taylor-Joy says she spent months on George Miller’s Furiosa set without delivering any lines, filming wordless action sequences over and over and studiously — sometimes emotionally — analyzing her acting choices. The result, she adds, was so intense she is still processing the experience even two years after filming.
“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” she told the New York Times this week. “I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”
Miller’s new Mad Max entry sees Taylor-Joy as Imperator Furiosa (taking over for Charlize Theron) and Chris Hemsworth as a devious warlord in a story that takes place 15 years before the previous film.
Taylor-Joy said she knew the movie was going to be intense (Miller’s films, in particular the Mad Max franchise, have a reputation as such). “I wanted to be changed,” she said. “I wanted to be put in a situation in extremis where I would have no choice but to grow. And I got it.”
On set, she and Miller spent arduous months perfecting action sequences, analyzing the minutia of Furiosa’s facial expressions. “He had a very, very strict idea of what Furiosa’s war face looked like, and that only allowed me my eyes for a large portion of the movie. It was very much ‘mouth closed, no emotion, speak with your eyes.’ That’s it, that’s all you have,” Taylor-Joy said. She prefaced the comments by adding, “I love George and if you’re going to do something like this, you want to be in the hands of someone like George Miller.”
Miller’s vision of stoicism, though, sometimes didn’t match Taylor-Joy’s read of of her character. “I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” she said, adding that there is a scream in the movie she had to advocate for for three months.
Still, she adds: “I wanted to make sure that I was never insolent in any way, that it was always a conversation. At the end of the day, this is his vision. I can present everything that I have, but his word goes.”
When they finished filming, Taylor-Joy said she needed the two years between then and now to process the experience, even adding elsewhere in the interview there were experiences she still wasn’t ready to discuss. “Talk to me in 20 years,” she said. “Talk to me in 20 years.”
Taylor-Joy’s co-star also paid her compliments in the same profile. “What you’re being asked to dig into and display emotionally is exhausting,” said Hemsworth. “I found what she did inspiring because she was there every single day for months on end and was as fiercely protective of the character as you’d want.”
At the time of the interview, Taylor-Joy hadn’t yet seen anything beyond an unfinished cut of the film. “I’m curious, once I watch it, if I’ll ever be able to watch it again,” she said, noting it might be too intense an experience.
Nevertheless, she added, “I will never regret this experience, on so many different levels, but it’s a very particular story to have. There’s not everyone in the world that has made a ‘Mad Max’ movie, and I swear to God, everyone that I’ve met that has, there’s a look in our eyes: We know. There’s an immediate kinship of like, ‘OK, hey, I see you.’”
Furiosa hits theaters next Friday.
