The true star of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga isn’t even on the poster. It isn’t Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the title character, nor is it Chris Hemsworth, although both give triumphant performances. You may not even recognize the name of the actor who runs away with George Miller’s fiery Fury Road prequel. But she’s in over half of the film, and she, too, plays the titular Furiosa: Alyla Browne.
Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa, touted as the film’s star, only appears in the back half of the vengeful anti-hero’s origin story. Up until around an hour or so into the film, Furiosa is played by Browne, who stars as the younger version of the character. For the first part of the movie, we watch Furiosa as a child and adolescent struggle to make her way back home through the wasteland after she’s kidnapped by a band of stragglers who work for the evil Dementus (Hemsworth).
This helps to explain why Taylor-Joy only had a reported 30-ish lines of dialogue in the film—I was shocked to see she’s really hardly in the movie at all. Well, perhaps that’s hyperbole. But to only have your star in half of the film, to me, is jarring! She and Browne split the acting duties equally; therefore, we should be talking more about Browne’s performance, especially considering how tremendous it is.
Alyla Browne as Furiosa.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Warner Bros.The 14-year-old actress runs away with Furiosa. A dead ringer for Taylor-Joy—although looks don’t really make a role; plus, Miller used CGI to blend the actress’ faces together to really seal the deal—Browne is perfect for the role of young Furiosa: scrappy, confused, with one helluva bite. I mean that literally, since Furiosa is forced to spend the first half hour of the movie chomping her way out of situations—chewing through an enemy’s gas pipe, using her teeth as weapons—while her hands are tied.
Furiosa continuously goes toe-to-toe with Dementus, who wants to use the young girl to find a new, more fruitful home in the mysterious Green Place. After torturing and killing Furiosa’s mother, Dementus drags the girl to a new world: the Citadel, led by the familiar Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his cronies, the War Boys.
There, Browne really shines as Furiosa. Although Furiosa may not speak all that often while shifting hands from Dementus to Immortan Joe, Browne thoughtfully portrays a wide spectrum of emotions—utter confusion, bone-chilling fear, fragile hope—while trying to plot another escape route. All the while, Furiosa is still mourning the death of her mother and loss of her closest friends and family in the Green Place.
It’s truly miraculous how Furiosa has the metabolism to digest all of this at once, and equally stunning is how masterful Browne is at conveying all of this while also trying to echo the performances of Taylor-Joy and Mad Max: Fury Road’s Furiosa, Charlize Theron. This is the peak of child acting, as good as it gets. Again—put Browne on the poster! She’s as much Furiosa as Taylor-Joy is in this film.
Plus, Browne must have an amazing chameleonic talent, because this isn’t her first time playing the younger version of another character in a movie. The up-and-coming star worked with Miller previously on Three Thousand Years of Longing, in which she played a younger version of Tilda Swinton. She also played the adolescent version of Alycia Debnam-Carey in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, and starred as Nicole Kidman’s daughter in Nine Perfect Strangers. Have we another McKenna Grace on our hands here?
Clearly the answer is yes, because post-Furiosa, Browne is set to star in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 alongside Idris Elba, Keanu Reeves, and James Marsden. May the stars be with her.
