Anya Taylor-Joy Opens Up About the Isolation She Felt While Filming 'Furiosa'
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
For Anya Taylor-Joy, the hardest part of filming Furiosa wasn’t the stunts (though she did receive stunt car and weapons training for the project); it was the isolation.
In our June/July issue, the actress tells ELLE that while she sought out the psychological challenge, it was extraordinarily tough to live through for six months straight. “I was really pushing the boundary of what my body and mind could do,” she said. She shared her thoughts during her 3 A.M. car rides to the Australian set: “I was driving through the streets of Sydney like, ‘I’ve not seen a single person in months. I haven’t seen anybody who doesn’t look like they’re in the Wasteland. I’ve been living in an alien world.’”
Still, Taylor-Joy chose this experience to force herself to grow, as an actress and human being. “[I] wanted to be pushed,” she said. “I wanted to really understand grit in a different way. Because I knew that I had it. But I understood that in isolation, I was going to really experience it. Okay, you’re in a house in the middle of nowhere with just your thoughts and this character. How do you cope with that? And when you don’t have comfort around you—when there’s nothing that you can turn to for distraction—how are you going to experience that?
“My favorite flowers have always been seeded dandelions or the daisies that grow through concrete,” she continued. “I think I wanted to be placed in concrete. I wanted to understand how that would feel. When you get too comfortable, you stop growing.”
Taylor-Joy also felt a profound connection to Furiosa herself when she read the Mad Max series’ prequel script. “The most beautiful and heartbreaking thing about Furiosa is that she’s the embodiment of impossible hope—living in a world where everything is a violation to you,” she said. “The air that you breathe, the lack of food, the fact that empathy is punished, that trust is punished. And throughout it all, she just has this relentless conviction that she’s going to make good on that promise she made. I still get chills thinking about it.”
Taylor-Joy’s new comments about filming come on the heels of her New York Times interview, published on Monday. In that piece, she touches on the isolation she felt on set.
She said, “I’ve never been more alone than making that movie. I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.” When pressed to say more, Taylor-Joy declined: “Next question, sorry. Talk to me in 20 years. Talk to me in 20 years.”
You Might Also Like
