The next chapter in the magnificent Mad Max saga is here in the form of Furiosa, the Fury Road prequel we’ve been waiting for since that Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron movie became one of the greatest action films of all time in 2015. Unfortunately, it sounds like the curse of Fury Road has struck again on Furiosa. Just ask Anya Taylor-Joy. No, wait, don’t, because she won’t answer.
Fury Road infamously endured a tortuous production, with Hardy and Theron hating each others’ guts but forced to shoot in a cramped car in the middle of the desert for months on end. With new stars Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth on board this time around, any intense actor vs. actor problems seem to have been avoided on Furiosa, but it still sounds like The Queen’s Gambit actress had a wildly taxing time making this movie. If only we knew what she actually went through.
What little the star has said, though, is enough to get her fans seriously concerned.
Anya Taylor-Joy’s troubling Furiosa comments, explained
If you’ve kept up with the various print interviews the actress has been giving amid the Furiosa press tour, you might notice something faintly alarming: The usually bubbly and upbeat Taylor-Joy comes across as downright haunted and traumatized while talking about the Mad Max prequel’s shoot.
Most illuminatingly, Taylor-Joy admitted to The New York Times that she has “never been more alone” than during the six-and-a-half-month stretch she filmed Furiosa in the Australian outback. “I don’t want to go too deep into it,” the actress stressed, “but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”
Upon being asked to elaborate on what was so difficult about the shoot, Taylor-Joy elected to plead the fifth. “Next question, sorry,” was the only response she gave. “Talk to me in 20 years.”
Taylor-Joy’s loyal fans know this isn’t typical for the Dune: Part Two star so they’re mighty concerned at what really happened down under that’s still so tough for her to talk about even two years on from the film’s production.
In the same interview, Taylor-Joy likewise came clean that finally seeing the film for the first time brought with it a lot of PTSD. “I knew I was going to need the two years that it took for the movie to come out to deal with it,” she said, before recalling her reaction at the Furiosa premiere: “Within the first three minutes, I’m crying. And afterward, I cannot speak. I found it very traumatizing to watch.”
Given that Hardy, Theron, and certain other actors from the original Mad Max movies of the 1980s have all talked about how troubled the shoots have been, some have pointed the finger at director George Miller and are accusing him of perpetuating traumatic or unsafe working conditions. It’s important to stress that no one’s ever leveled any such allegations his way, however. In fact, Taylor-Joy stressed to The New York Times how she trusted him as a filmmaker, even if his exacting style contributed to her feeling limited and frustrated on set.
“I love George, and if you’re going to do something like this, you want to be in the hands of someone like George Miller,” she said. “But he 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.”
Maybe one observer got pretty close with their summary of the situation: “I’m upset ppl think this means “George Miller is a creep” when it likely means “nobody knows what the hell is going on on a George Miller set except George Miller and everyone has to live in the desert for a year.”
Basically, no matter how successful Furiosa is, don’t expect Anya Taylor-Joy to make a sequel.