Ever since her breakout role in the harrowing horror film The Witch, actress Anya Taylor-Joy has stood out as not only a talent to watch, but a formidable, unflappable presence. Maybe that’s part of why her latest interviews surrounding George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in which she stars as the titular heroine, have caused such a palpable ripple of alarm. Like some of her Mad Max predecessors, Taylor-Joy appears to have gone through hell and back in order to pull off the job.
The groundbreaking 2015 blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road notoriously required its actors, crew, and stunt team to perform while isolated in the desert in Namibia for months and, as its prequel, Furiosa necessitated similar filming conditions. Even so, one imagines that such extreme requirements would inspire some sense of camaraderie. But as Taylor-Joy told reporter Kyle Buchanan at the New York Times this week, “I’ve never been more alone than making [Furiosa]. I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”
When Buchanan pressed the actress for more details, Taylor-Joy demurred, saying, “Talk to me in 20 years.” She eventually opened up a bit further, explaining that because of Miller’s bare-boned script and hard-nosed vision for her character, “months” went by on set without her character speaking a single line.
ADVERTISEMENT
Miller “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,” Taylor-Joy said. “It was very much ‘mouth closed, no emotion, speak with your eyes.’ That’s it, that’s all you have.”
“We’d do takes where he’d be like, ‘Do it again with your mouth closed,’” Taylor-Joy elaborated to Variety. “He has a thing about my mouth. He thinks when my mouth is open, I look too young.”
“This is the wasteland, and any outbreak of emotion is punished by death,” Taylor-Joy went on in her Variety interview. “Any empathy is punished by death—any kindness, really. It all made sense to me. I think the restrictions that were placed on me by George did create a radiation off the character, because she is being suppressed continuously throughout the film.”
“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,” Taylor-Joy told the Times.
Those in the press called Taylor-Joy’s comments “deeply unsettling” and noted she seems “borderline despondent” about the filming process. And not only do her anecdotes all feel like evidence of isolation in extremis, but her accounts are also reminiscent of the ones documented by Buchanan in his book Blood, Sweat & Chrome, an oral history of Fury Road.
When the Oscar-winning film first came out, much ink was spilled over the fact that during the grueling filming process, co-stars Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy openly hated each other. As the story went, the two had completely different working styles. Hardy liked to play up his moody “bad boy” side and was frequently late to set, while Theron, a disciplined ex-dancer, was always extremely punctual.
During one epic showdown between Theron and Hardy, camera operator Mark Goellnicht told Buchanan, Theron jumped “out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at [Hardy], saying, ‘Fine the fucking cunt a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew,’ and ‘How disrespectful you are!’”
“She was right,” Goellnicht said. “Full rant. She screams it out. It’s so loud, it’s so windy—he might’ve heard some of it, but he charged up to her and went, ‘What did you say to me?’ He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point.”
“I’m an optimist, so I saw [Theron and Hardy’s] behavior as mirroring their characters, where they had to learn to cooperate in order to ensure mutual survival,” Miller, somewhat chillingly, told The Telegraph in a new interview this week where he reflected on the co-stars’ feud. “There’s no excuse for it, and I think there’s a tendency in this business to use great performances as an excuse for other disruption that could be avoided.”
The question that remains is whether Miller’s prioritization of great performances over the comfort of his actors carried over into Furiosa, and to what extent. Actors can handle a lot, and they know what they’re signing up for. But how much is too much? And is the worst possible fate on a Mad Max film midnight call times in the desert, or extreme loneliness? At least when Hardy and Theron were at each other’s throats, they were having a shared experience.
When Taylor-Joy, meanwhile, has watched rough cuts of the film, she told Variety earlier this month, “Within the first three minutes, I’m crying,” she said. “And afterward, I cannot speak. I found it very traumatizing to watch.”
@makaveli75paris #anyataylorjoy arrives in cannes with the crazy body Part 2 #anyataylorjoyedit #anyataylorjoyedits #anya #taylor #joye #madmax #furiosa #split #cannesfestival #festivalcannes2024 #fashionweek #mood #girl #dior #cannes2024 @FestivaldeCannes ♬ son original - Makaveli75paris
The experience of watching the film will presumably be much smoother for audiences at the Cannes Film Festival, which is hosting the world premiere of Furiosa on Wednesday. Taylor-Joy’s experience in Cannes hasn’t been totally drama-free so far—on Tuesday, a clip of her fending off a particularly aggressive autograph seeker went viral—but hopefully things will cool down soon for the actress. It sounds like she could use a nice French vacation.
