Furiosa Is Here to Rule the Summer-Movie Wasteland

Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, with Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into the iconically badass role made famous by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, roars into theaters this weekend. Culture editor Alex Pappademas talked to GQ’s senior staff writer Gabriella Paiella about what we can expect from the year’s most anticipated sequel.

Alex Pappademas: Hi Gaby! So: You have seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and I have not yet. Without spoiling anything, please tell me everything!

But, specifically, tell me this: One thing I loved about Mad Max: Fury Road, the previous Mad Max film, is that it gives us just enough world-building without going overboard. George Miller seemed to understand that when you’re fleshing out a sci-fi reality, less is usually more—once we’ve heard someone mention “The Bullet Farm,” we don’t need to see it, because just knowing these characters commute to and from a place called “The Bullet Farm” tells you a lot about what this world is like.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is obviously meant to fill in the backstory of a character we met in the first film, so by definition it’s going to be more expository. Does it feel like a different kind of movie?

Gabriella Paiella: Spoiler: We’re going to see the Bullet Farm.

I also loved the restrained world-building in Fury Road. (If we can legally use the word restrained in a 50-mile vicinity of anything Mad Max–related.) We still get the explosive car chases that melt your face off and the horrible dudes in questionable outfits overrunning the Wasteland in Furiosa, but it’s for sure more expository, and you do see so much more of their world than in the first one—you’re not contained to the triangle route. And you get the explanations for why some of the things in Fury Road are the way they are. But you’re still not getting, say, Immortan Joe’s backstory spelled out.

Anyone who’s seen Fury Road already knows what Furiosa’s future holds. She’s going to end up driving for Immortan Joe and she’s going to lose that arm. Does the tone of this one reflect the bleakness of Furiosa’s destiny? And how does that kind of storytelling mesh with a fictional world where, canonically, the Doof Warrior also exists?

While the material is undoubtedly bleaker, there is still a patina of goofiness to the whole thing. Chris Hemsworth alone (as a diabolical warlord named Dementus) is putting in the work. I did find the kookiness—why does everyone get such a wacky name post-apocalypse?—more grating this time around, for that exact reason.

But in terms of knowing where the movie was going, I did feel Fury Road retreat from my mind. You really, really want to believe that it’s all going to work out for young Furiosa—and sometimes it almost seems like it will.

Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Furiosa in this one, seems to develop a 10,000-yard stare in interviews when she’s asked about what it was like to make this movie. So far, she hasn’t specified why it was such an intense experience—but having watched the film, do you feel like you understand why it was so grueling?

One of the chase scenes alone took 77 days to film, so I’m guessing it was a combination of a ton of physical exertion plus having all of 30 lines of dialogue in the film. It’s a very interior role. This week, I did a Q&A with the actor Tom Burke, who plays Praetorian Jack, and I asked him about that. “A lot of what she felt was, in some way or other, the journey of that character. And I believe that when Anya says it because Anya lives what she's doing. She's the best version of a Method actress in that way because she still wants to be affected by her environment,” he told me. “She doesn't disappear off between takes and she doesn't need everyone to call her Furiosa. She's in the room with you. But then, action. And so I'm not surprised. Your body doesn't know you're lying when you're acting if you're doing it properly.”

Burke plays the only guy in this movie who isn’t a violently misogynistic video-game level-boss from hell—which is funny, because I remember him best as the shady boyfriend in The Souvenir.

He played a similar type of character in a movie called True Things. When we talked he told me it was a relief to do Furiosa and play a character who could forge a genuine connection with other people. I thought it was funny that he had to make a movie set in a literal apocalyptic wasteland in order to find that.

You asked Tom Burke this question I’m going to ask you: What’s your apocalypse plan? Do you think much about how you might fare in a Wasteland-type environment?

I think about this any time I consume a bit of apocalyptic media and my answer is that I would simply give up. Opt out. No thank you. The apocalypse? That’s none of my business.

Originally Appeared on GQ