Hitting the Fury Road: Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth go inside “Furiosa”, their full-throttle “Mad Max” prequel

Director George Miller and stars Taylor-Joy, Hemsworth, and Tom Burke preview what to expect from the Furiosa origin story.

Witness this: On a bustling set at Quixote Studios in West Hollywood, just days before Oscars Sunday in March, cans of "guzzoline" are strewn about. What looks like a real missile lies on the floor, scrap metal is everywhere — including a wrecking ball and throwing spears — shades of red and orange light up a giant backdrop so bright you can almost feel the heat coming off of it, and the mechanical whirring of power tools reverberates in the distance.

This isn't the set of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it could be. After all, stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth are here, and so is Furiosa's car, Cranky Black, which is fittingly billowing angry smoke.

But some things are off. For starters, Hemsworth, 40, wants clarification on a shot because he admittedly knows nothing about the inner workings of cars — not ideal for anyone looking to survive the high-octane Wasteland of the apocalyptic Mad Max universe. Then there's the fact that in between takes, Taylor-Joy, 28, and her costar joke around with goofy poses for the camera, a far cry, as Hemsworth points out, from the "definitely antagonistic" relationship between their characters, Furiosa and Dementus. As he puts it, "She's trying to kill me this whole movie."

Indeed, Furiosa — an epic, Odyssey-esque prequel to franchise co-mastermind George Miller's Oscar-winning hit Mad Max: Fury Road — follows the titular character over the roughly two decades before she becomes the Imperator, a position Miller likens to the CEO of her clan. Her journey begins when the warlord Dementus' men violently pluck her from her serene and bountiful home in the Green Place of Many Mothers. She becomes his prized possession (though not before witnessing Dementus commit a heinous act that makes him Furiosa's mortal enemy), and he soon takes her to Immortan Joe's Citadel. There, young Furiosa (played by ​​Alyla Browne and then Taylor-Joy) plots her revenge and way back home, all while Dementus and Immortan Joe (played by the late Hugh Keays-Byrne in Fury Road and Lachy Hulme here) battle over control of the Citadel.

Before Miller even sat down to make 2015's Fury Road, the 79-year-old — who co-created the long-running Australian film franchise with Byron Kennedy that also includes Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) — plotted out Furiosa's entire backstory (among other characters') as a reference for that film’s cast and crew. But now, he tells Entertainment Weekly that this prequel is "a lot more improved" from those earlier outlines. When asked how, Miller pauses thoughtfully before settling on Dementus and Furiosa's relationship, which he says became "more palpable" while shooting the film, no doubt a result of the casting of his leads.

Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy may not be immediately obvious choices for their respective parts — he of Marvel Cinematic Universe's Thor fame, and she of indie, arthouse, and period film notoriety — but that wasn't a concern for Miller. "It is purely an intuitive decision," he says of his casting process, speaking to EW in the massive Nobu suite at Caesars Palace looking out over the Las Vegas strip just before taking the stage at CinemaCon in April. "You've got to say to yourself, 'Okay, there's something about this actor and who they are intrinsically as a person. Can the Venn diagram overlap [with the character] to some degree? How much will it overlap, and what can they bring?'"

As the film’s main villain, Dementus is loud, brazen, darkly humorous, and completely morally bankrupt. Like everyone else in the Mad Max universe, he is a product of the Wasteland he calls home. Miller went into making Furiosa without anyone in mind for the role, but was struck by Hemsworth after meeting with him. "He had a lot of wisdom about everything — about himself, about the world, about even a story like this, where it's a world in extremis, and about how people would cope with all the moral injuries that happen in this world," Miller says.

As for his leading lady, Taylor-Joy first caught Miller's eye in Edgar Wright's 2021 film Last Night in Soho. He again references that Venn diagram overlap — noting the Miami-born, London- and Buenos Aires-raised actress is the "youngest of six siblings," has the "discipline of being a ballet dancer," is a "rider of motorbikes," and someone who "left home really young to go off into the adventure land of acting."

"Have you met Anya?" Miller asks before excitedly putting into words what anyone who has seen her work has undoubtedly felt: "There's definitely a mystique to her, but also, there's someone very, very resolute in her. You sense it almost immediately. And I think that's up there on the screen." It's safe to say anyone at the March cover shoot would agree.

The Queen’s Gambit SAG winner and Emmy nominee was aware of the Mad Max cineverse, but it wasn’t until she saw Fury Road that she had her full-throttle introduction. "I was shooting [the 2016 sci-fi thriller Morgan] in Belfast, and I went to see it with the cast. I remember finishing the movie and standing up and clapping — it blew my mind so much," Taylor-Joy recalls. In what she considers "a nice little bit of kismet," she was walking by that same Belfast cinema while filming 2022's The Northman, when she got the call cementing her role as Furiosa.

As a native Australian, Hemsworth had the opposite relationship with the Outback-set series. "I grew up on this s---, and it was so exciting to be a part of it," Hemsworth gushes. He remembers watching the original films as a kid with his dad and brothers, fellow actors Luke and Liam. When it came time to recast for Fury Road — Mel Gibson, who had played the eponymous Mad Max in the first three films, was considered too old for the long-gestating third sequel — Hemsworth wanted nothing more than to play Max Rockatansky himself. At the time, he was coming off a soap opera, Home and Away, but he "couldn't even get a call or a meeting or anything." This was circa 2010, pre-Marvel. By his own admission, "I just hadn't done enough to warrant that." (The role eventually went to Tom Hardy.) A few years and a couple of Thors and Avengers later, Hemsworth saw Fury Road and promptly got his agent on the phone: "I was completely absorbed and taken for the adventure and the ride. I said, 'I've got to work with this guy, he's a genius.' And then, the rest is history."

Taking the wheel

Dementus is a new character in the Mad Max films, but Furiosa, of course, is not. The role was originated in Fury Road by Charlize Theron, but — out of a mutual respect for the character-building process — Taylor-Joy did not speak with her predecessor until after filming. "You have to go on your own journey with it," Taylor-Joy explains. "But as soon as it was done, I reached out to her because I'm such a fan, not only of her as an actress but her as a person. And she's as wonderful and cool as you could possibly hope, and really supportive and classy, so I appreciated it." (Furiosa, Miller says, chronologically "butts up directly into Fury Road," and for this reason, Taylor-Joy did find it helpful to obsessively rewatch the first 10 minutes of that film to get a feel for the filmmaking.)

The actress felt a responsibility to "tell the story of the person in this script." Though, in something of a Mad Max tradition, that person and that script aren't exactly verbose. (Gibson famously only had 16 lines of dialogue in The Road Warrior, so she's in good company.) As such, Taylor-Joy says Miller had a "very set idea" about how Furiosa uses body language to communicate, right down to the way she "holds her face." "It ended up being something that only gave me, for a large portion of the movie, my eyes to telegraph the story," she says, admitting that aspect "was quite frightening."

But she trusted Miller, and pulled from her experience with "very internal characters." If anything, she says having those set boundaries "created this sense of binding that I think is so prevalent in her life. She's not able to react the way that she wants to. She's not able to do what she wants. She's desperately trying to fulfill a promise [to get back home] in a world run by two insane men. So I felt for her. I was like, ‘Damn, sister, that sucks.'"

Of course, as fans of Fury Road well know, in order to fulfill that promise, along the way she loses her arm and shaves off her hair — pivotal moments depicted in Furiosa. "Both were important steps that we had to take if we were going to be able to chart the journey of how this little girl became a character that now we all know and love," Taylor-Joy explains. Although the way she loses her appendage won't be spoiled here, the actress teases that the moment is very befitting of her resolute character. "It made sense to me because I think what's incredible about this character is she just refuses to die — really, she refuses," she says. "And it made sense to me that she would lose her arm in the pursuit of something that she thought was bigger than herself. That made a lot of sense to me."

What’s driving Dementus?

Like his costar, Hemsworth felt some trepidation over his role. He admits that tackling the bombastic, villainous character — a far cry from his star-making superhero role — "scared the s--- out of me." Despite having two years to study the script, it wasn't until two weeks before shooting began that he realized, "I don't really have a handle on the character. And I don't quite have all the confidence that I would normally have walking into this."

On his director's advice, Hemsworth spent time journaling as Dementus. One night, he woke up with his "head spinning," rolled over, and put pen to paper as his character. "It was about the why of the character more," he says. "I think I was focusing too much on what he's doing in the script rather than why he was doing it and why he'd become that."

From there, the hair, makeup, costumes, and that prosthetic nose all informed his take on the character. Of the nose specifically, Hemsworth says Miller wanted Dementus "to be this historic-looking Roman figure." And, yes, it also helped make the character not look like Chris Hemsworth. "It's one of the only times in my entire career that a male costar has been in the makeup chair for as long as I have," Taylor-Joy jokes, turning to Hemsworth, who is seated next to her in the underbelly of the Colosseum at Caesars after their CinemaCon presentation. "So, good on you."

"Yeah, it was a real departure, and it was nice…" he says before catching himself. "I was about to say it was nice not to wear a cape, but... I did have a cape in this film. And it's red — or it becomes red eventually, as well. The absurdity of that."

Hemsworth says he brought up this similarity to Miller, who had not put the two together. "It's not intentional to be a comparison of Thor," says the actor, "but I found a wonderful departure to it — to play the villain, transform, and inhabit a completely different physicality was a lot of fun. I loved it. And it was the real attraction."

Another attraction, "besides working with George, was just to dirty it up and to be messy and ugly and violent and chaotic, rather than being in the somewhat predictable box of the hero in a superhero space," he continues. "There's a whole lot of rules that you have to stick to [with that]. With this, I could throw that out the window, which was nice."

Evoking the repartee displayed at EW's cover shoot, Taylor-Joy interjects to ask her costar the pressing question: "After years of capes, are they annoying?" Without skipping a beat, Hemsworth replies, "Hate 'em. So impractical."

The noble road warrior

Another actor who was thrilled to play against type — albeit for the opposite reason — is Tom Burke, who costars as the mysterious Praetorian Jack. The English actor, best known for BBC series The Musketeers, Strike, and War & Peace, had just finished playing a number of "lousy people" when he first talked to Miller about the role. Based on his recent work, Burke was convinced Miller would cast him as someone "probably fairly grotesque and covered in boils," musing that "maybe you wouldn't even see most of me. I'd be inside an old, rusted-up, converted, pimped-up washing machine or something." So, when Miller first used the word "noble" to describe Jack, Burke says he was "almost moved to tears."

In crafting the character — who fittingly shares a name with the "praetorian" soldiers who served as bodyguards for the Roman emperor — Burke worked closely with Miller to create a backstory. They settled on Jack being from a military family that perhaps knew Immortan Joe before he was the Immortan Joe. At some point, "there was a journey to the Citadel, and they had a certain idea of what that life might be that was very different from what it turned out to be," says the actor, 42.

As the driver of this film’s War Rig, Jack is something of a Fury Road legend to the inhabitants of the Citadel. Given that Furiosa comes to drive the War Rig in Fury Road, it's not a stretch to imagine he plays an important role in her overall evolution. All Burke will tease is that he thinks their relationship "gives really nice context to some of the dynamics she has with Max in Fury Road."

Speaking of the Mad man himself, Max and his beloved car, the Interceptor, make a humorously appropriate blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the film, which Miller says he had no choice but to include. "In doing what we did in the preparation of Mad Max: Fury Road, we also wrote what happened to Max in the year before we encounter him in [that film]," he explains. "And as we get towards the end of this movie, the chronology... Basically, we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened. The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance."

Crossing the finish line

A Mad Max movie isn't complete without a fast and furious stunt-heavy sequence, and Furiosa has a truly gobsmacking one that involves the Fury Road, featuring Furiosa, Praetorian Jack, and his rig. To say much more would spoil the shiny, chrome fun of the lengthy set piece, which needs to be seen to be believed — even, apparently, for the actors who took part in the filming of it. There is so much going on in every inch of every frame that Burke says, "You just want to stop and take it all in all the time. I will do this forever," he adds of the experience. "This is heaven."

Taylor-Joy agrees. "I wanted something that was going to challenge my body and soul, and it was definitely that," she says, joking that her "War Rig Workout" is coming soon. "I think I was surprised. What I thought would be difficult was really easy, and what I thought would be easy was actually very difficult." Regarding the stunts and the filming experience as a whole, she says she's "really proud of the dedication and genuine care that has gone into it. And I have a soft spot in my heart for Australia forever now. That was really an incredible place where I got to learn so much about myself and meet some really wonderful people."

Hemsworth, too, says the project was worth spinning his wheels over. "I've heard people talk about how you want to choose the roles that scare you. And, yeah, it's sort of an actor-y thing to say. But I think it was a good thing. I think it forces you to dig that bit deeper. And the challenges, the adversity — that's where the growth occurs. I feel like I learned more on this film than anything I'd ever done because of what was asked of all of us and how challenging it was, in a wonderful way.”

Making the first Mad Max movie was actually so challenging that Miller almost walked away from filmmaking. "Really, I found the process way too hard until someone told me, but it's always hard," he admits with a laugh.

Clearly, he persisted. And while he has many credits to his name (Babe, Happy Feet, Three Thousand Years of Longing, to name a few), Mad Max continues to define his legacy — much to Miller's amusement. "Mad Max 2 came about because of all the things I learned from Mad Max: Not only how to make films but, despite the difficulty I had in making it, why it was so successful," he explains. "Why did the Japanese respond to it as a Samurai movie? Why did the French call it a Western on Wheels? Why did the Scandinavians see it as a lone Viking [film], and so on. And I realized that, inadvertently, we'd tapped into some sort of archetype."

Now, 45 years and four sequels later, "here I am making another Mad Max movie, which I never anticipated after the first one," he muses. "I mean, as John Lennon said, life is what happens when you're making other plans."

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Directed by Alison Wild & Kristen Harding 

Photographs by Max Montgomery

Motion - DP: Danny Grunes; 1st AD: Alex Comery; Gaffer: Albert Gonzales; Key Grip: Josh Markvan; Production Designer: Johnny Love; Producer: Jose Maldonado; Production Manager: Hanna Benavides; Production: Framework Studio

Post-Production - Color Correction: Carlos Flores/Forager; VFX: Carlos Morales/Forager; Design: Chuck Kerr; Composer: Tom Holkenborg; Sound Design: Carlos Flores/Forager

Behind -the-Cover Video - DP: Ted Newsome; Film Videographer: Matilda Montgomery; Associate Video Producer/Editor: Morgan Sanguedolce

EW Creative - Photo Director: Alison Wild; Head of Video: Kristen Harding; Creative Director: Chuck Kerr

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.