In a new profile of “Furiosa” director George Miller published by The Telegraph, it’s revealed that Anya Taylor-Joy’s eponymous character only has around 30 lines of dialogue in the upcoming “Mad Max: Fury Road” prequel movie. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to fans of the road warrior franchise, as Tom Hardy and Mel Gibson barely had much to say in Miller’s previous “Mad Max” movies. However, Taylor-Joy did push Miller to let Furiosa get loud in the new movie.
In an interview with The New York Times, Taylor-Joy said she would go “months” on the movie’s set without speaking a single line of dialogue. She added: “I’ve never been more alone than making that movie. I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”
When asked what proved more difficult than she expected on the “Furiosa” set, the actor answered: “Next question, sorry. Talk to me in 20 years. Talk to me in 20 years.”
One thing Taylor-Joy did make abundantly clear was that Furiosa needed a moment of female rage on screen, even if Miller was focused on making her as internal as possible on screen.
“I do want to 100 percent preface this by saying 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,” Taylor-Joy said. “But 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.”
“I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” Taylor-Joy added, noting she’s grown somewhat tired of female characters in movies often enduring hardships and only getting to shed a single tear. She told Miller that Furiosa deserved an eruption of emotion.
“We’re animals, and there’s a point where somebody just snaps,” Taylor-Joy explained. “There’s one scream in that movie, and I am not joking when I tell you that I fought for that scream for three months.”
“With George, it’s a long game,” Taylor-Joy added.
Taylor-Joy stressed that whenever she had a note about Furiosa, she made sure that it was always a “conversation” with Miller and “I was never insolent in any way…at the end of the day, this is his vision. I can present everything that I have, but his word goes.”
“Furiosa” opens in theaters May 24 from Warner Bros. following a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Head over to The New York Times’ website to read Taylor-Joy’s profile in its entirety.
