Anya Taylor-Joy says she’s ‘never been more alone’ than while filming Furiosa

Anya Taylor-Joy has said filming George Miller’s forthcoming Mad Max spinoff Furiosa left her so emotionally drained she took two years to process it.

“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” the actor told the New York Times.

“I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”

Furiosa stars Taylor-Joy as the younger version of Charlize Theron’s Mad Max character Furiosa and Chris Hemsworth as the lead villain Dementus.

Talking about how she felt when filming wrapped up in November 2022, Taylor-Joy said: “Like I knew I was going to need the two years that it took for the movie to come out to deal with it.”

Pressed to explain what she meant, she said: “Talk to me in 20 years.”

In a separate interview earlier this week, Miller said Taylor-Joy only has 30 lines of dialogue in the 2 hour and 28 minute runtime of the film.

“The problem with dialogue is that it tends to slow things down and film is a medium that’s often best enjoyed at high speed,” he told The Telegraph.

But it wasn’t just on camera that Taylor-Joy stayed silent.

“I do want to 100 per cent preface this by saying 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. It was very much ‘mouth closed, no emotion, speak with your eyes’. That’s it, that’s all you have.”

The actor, however, said that she disagreed with Miller on this extreme version of stoicism.

“I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” adding that she was not a fan of showing female characters endure severe hardship while only crying a single tear.

“We’re animals, and there’s a point where somebody just snaps,” she said. “There’s one scream in that movie, and I am not joking when I tell you that I fought for that scream for three months.”

Despite how hard she fought for it, Taylor-Joy added: “I wanted to make sure that I was never insolent in any way, that it was always a conversation. At the end of the day, this is his vision. I can present everything that I have, but his word goes.”

All the films in the Mad Max franchise are intense, on screen and off, and it was something Taylor-Joy was prepared for and welcomed.

“I wanted to be changed,” she said. “I wanted to be put in a situation in extremis where I would have no choice but to grow. And I got it.”

“I will never regret this experience, on so many different levels, but it’s a very particular story to have,” she added.

“There’s not everyone in the world that has made a Mad Max movie, and I swear to God, everyone that I’ve met that has, there’s a look in our eyes: We know. There’s an immediate kinship of like, ‘OK, hey, I see you.’”

Furiosa will be released in cinemas on 24 May after a screening at the Cannes Film Festival on 15 May.