The movie that almost broke Anya Taylor-Joy: “I’ve never been more alone”
When actors hit the promotional trail for their movies, they brace themselves for weeks of answering the same questions from countless journalists and media outlets. It’s their job to help sell the picture, though, so generally they will try their best to field those questions with good humour, gushing praise of their director and co-stars, and some fun anecdotes. They don’t tend to do what Anya Taylor-Joy did when tasked with promoting a much-anticipated sequel from a visionary director, though. To the shock of several interviewers, she admitted the shoot nearly broke her, and that she’d never felt more alone in her entire life.
In 2015, George Miller made the long-awaited fourth instalment in his signature action movie series, Mad Max. Amazingly, the movie had been subject to literally decades of development hell, with a number of false starts and real-life roadblocks delaying a film he first came up with in 1987. Indeed, even when he cast Tom Hardy in the lead role of Max Rockatansky in 2010, production wouldn’t begin for another two years, and the movie wouldn’t see release for five years, thanks to an extensive post-production process.
Mad Max: Fury Road was a gruelling, intense production for everyone involved, not least Hardy and Charlize Theron, who played the soon-to-be iconic Furiosa in the film. It’s been well-documented that they failed to see eye to eye, and even almost came to blows on-set. Still, it was all worth it in the end when Fury Road made $380million at the box office, was hailed as one of the greatest action movies ever, and won six Oscars.
Naturally, such stratospheric success meant a fifth movie in the saga was inevitable, and the prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga finally arrived nine years later in May 2024. This time, Hardy was nowhere to be found, and Taylor-Joy was cast as a young Furiosa. Unfortunately, though, the production proved no less trying than Fury Road’s, and Taylor-Joy was startlingly honest about its difficulties when she spoke to The New York Times.
“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” the Queen’s Gambit star admitted. “I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.” When the journalist asked what exactly it was about the shoot that was so alienating, she refused to answer. “Next question, sorry,” she apologised. “Talk to me in 20 years.”
Digging a little deeper into some of the other things Taylor-Joy was willing to talk about, though, it seems the Furiosa shoot was a constant battle between her and Miller regarding Furiosa’s characterisation. In the finished film, she only has 30 lines of dialogue, and Miller constantly pushed for the character to be as stoic and taciturn as possible. This meant the young star could go “months” on-set without uttering a single word on camera.
“I think I fought more for this character than I had fought for any other character,” Taylor-Joy admitted. “George had such a specific vision for what he wanted her to be, and I just felt like it was my responsibility to fight for any moment where you could see a little bit of her rage come out.” Indeed, any glimpses of Furiosa’s emotions that did make it into the film were advocated for relentlessly by Taylor-Joy, who claimed she had to justify them to Miller “thousands of times.” She confessed, “Your conviction has to be unwavering if you want something to make it into one of his movies.”
Having said all this, Taylor-Joy was adamant that she didn’t regret making Furiosa, because now she belongs to a very special group of people: those who have been through the fire of a Mad Max film and lived to tell the tale. “There’s not everyone in the world that has made a Mad Max movie,” she acknowledged, “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.'”
