It took almost a decade, but Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is finally in theaters. The long-awaited prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, the latest entry in director George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise, centers on Imperator Furiosa’s backstory and makes for a fascinating contrast with the previous film. Where Fury Road was essentially one long high-octane thrill ride, Furiosa is a far more patient wasteland odyssey, telling the story of its heroine over many years. It’s a great movie for many reasons, particularly Miller’s strong direction and the film’s deliberate pace, but most of all because of Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance in the lead role.
Of course, we love what Charlize Theron brought to the part in Fury Road, but the recasting goes to show not just how much new life a franchise project can be injected with by allowing a new actor to take on an iconic character, but also that Taylor-Joy is one of best examples of a 21st century movie star. How so? Let’s take a look.
Building an Imperator
The road to bringing the Furiosa film to the big screen was quite different from most other blockbuster prequels. In an interview with AV Club, Miller said the screenplay for Furiosa was “virtually complete” before Fury Road’s production, meaning the story of this film was known to Miller and his collaborators before the former was even released. Charlize Theron even confirmed that she read the script for Furiosa as part of her preparation for shooting Fury Road. Her deep knowledge of Furiosa’s backstory informed her performance in that film, and helps this movie feel like a perfectly natural extension of its predecessor in terms of character, theme and world-building. Conventional wisdom would hold that Theron would reprise the role, but Miller decided to move in a different direction.
Part of that was because he wasn’t convinced by the current state of digital de-aging technology. Speaking to Variety, he said “I saw not only The Irishman, but Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, with Will Smith. Both of them were masterful directors, but it was never persuasive. I thought all people would be watching is Charlize looking young and knowing it’s an effect.” The long hiatus between Fury Road’s release and Furiosa’s production also made it clear to the veteran director that he wanted to find a new actor to take up the part, which he finally found in Anya Taylor-Joy after seeing her performance in an early cut of Edgar Wright’s (underrated) psychological horror film Last Night in Soho. Wright elaborated on this story on social media, saying that he connected the pair a mere two days before the COVID-19 lockdowns in March of 2020.
Given how well Fury Road was received by both critics and audiences, recasting such a pivotal character for her spin-off film was certainly a gamble. After all, Furiosa really is the main protagonist of Fury Road anyway, with Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky being more “along for the ride” as opposed to driving the action in any significant capacity. A project that further explores the characters, factions, and visual motifs established by Fury Road would necessitate Furiosa’s inclusion because of how intertwined she is with them. Yet, more so than any other creative choice he makes in the final product, Miller allowing Taylor-Joy to bring her own spin on the character is what most helps the film feel like an essential installment in the Mad Max mythos.
Anya Taylor-Fury
At a moment when plenty of digital ink has been spilled wondering if we still have movie stars, Anya Taylor-Joy has emerged as one of the few actors to rise within the last decade or so who deserves the title. Ever since her phenomenal debut performance in Robert Eggers’ 2015 horror masterpiece The Witch, Taylor-Joy has captivated several of the industry’s top directors, such as the aforementioned Edgar Wright, M. Night Shyamalan, Denis Villeneuve, and of course, George Miller. Beyond her work with auteurs, she’s also made a distinct impression on audiences in the Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit (for which she received an Emmy nomination), the surprise hit black comedy/horror film The Menu, and even added a billion dollar grosser to her resume with her voice role as Princess Peach in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
That’s a lot to achieve in such a short time, and if Furiosa is any indication, the Argentinian sensation’s career won’t be slowing down anytime soon. What makes her performance as Furiosa so enthralling besides her natural talent is how well the story takes advantage of the differences in performing style between her and Theron. Where Theron played Furiosa as raw rage barely contained, Taylor-Joy is far calmer, her anger simmering behind the glares she gives from across the room (or the wasteland). There’s a palpable sense that the terrors she sees and endures in this movie are what leave the Furiosa of Fury Road such an exhausted and enraged main hero. During much of the prequel’s events, Furiosa’s will to survive and fire to take vengeance on her tormentors is still driven just as much by the vestiges of her idealism as her darker impulses. Her one-woman war against Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is what finally breaks her down, what forges her into the character audiences fell in love with in Fury Road.
That Taylor-Joy communicates all of this mostly with her eyes and physicality — since the script gives her minimal dialogue — reinforces how forward-thinking of a choice it was for Miller to recast the role. Theron is perfectly capable of conveying those emotions, but the part of Furiosa’s internal journey we see in this new film is ideally suited to Taylor-Joy’s skills. More so than most actors currently working, Taylor-Joy is at her best when we can read everything her character is thinking along the lines of her face, in the details of her eyes. That sense of patient fury, of holding in her true feelings until she simply can’t anymore, is what gives her take on Furiosa an entirely new dimension.
Kill Them With Courage
It takes serious artistic courage to step into the shoes of a pre-established iconic character and put so much of her own spin on the material, but that’s exactly what Taylor-Joy does. It’s a stark reminder that if there’s any one thing that’s pushed her to the front of the pack in her generation of actors, it’s her insistence on making bold choices, a mindset she’s embraced as far back as the beginning of her career. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she revealed that she had to choose between her role in The Witch or a Disney Channel pilot. On the reason she went with the former, Taylor-Joy said “I just had this really good feeling about ‘The Witch’ that made me willing to forgo the Disney experience for the thing that felt unknown to me, the thing that felt sacred.”
Choosing roles where she digs deep into dark and messy territory with her characters has been the key to her artistic success ever since. Sure, she has screen presence and charisma to burn, but she also makes a point to challenge herself by playing characters where there are no easy answers as to how you’re supposed to feel about them. We’ve seen this with Thomasin in The Witch, Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit, and Sandie in Last Night in Soho, all of whom register as sympathetic but thorny in equal measure. Even some of her lesser known films, such as Thoroughbreds and the 2020 adaptation of Emma, feature her playing with the boundaries of what’s expected out of conventional protagonists (and in the case of the latter, she even willed herself into a nosebleed in-character. Really.)
If anything, Furiosa is simply one more entry in a long line of confirmations that whatever else is going on in Hollywood, Anya Taylor-Joy is certain to be a big part of its future. She’s the kind of brave and idiosyncratic performer we only see a few times in a generation, and so many brand name directors falling over each other to get her in their films should be more than enough evidence that she has the proverbial “it” factor. As a film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a stunning piece, but it wouldn’t get quite that far without an actor like Taylor-Joy in the lead role to help it over the finish line. She was trusted to take a character audiences knew and loved and make her her own, and given how well she knocks it out of the park, it’s practically guaranteed that even more high profile filmmakers will trust her with their projects going forward.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
