Anya Taylor-Joy on the Journey of Making 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' and Shaving Her head for the Role

Variety

Movie icon, Anya Taylor-Joy, shares her journey of what it was like filming 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' and doing her own stunts, driving a car without a license and getting dirtier than ever.

Transcript

00:00 First time that I even heard that Furiosa was a movie, I got a text from Edgar Wright and he just

00:05 said, "George Miller wants to speak to you," and I had a feeling that it was going to be about this

00:10 world. He asked me to do a speech from Network, which was the "I want you to get mad" speech,

00:16 which makes a lot of sense.

00:17 Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.

00:21 It was actually really wonderful to deliver that monologue specifically at that point in time,

00:26 because it's very much, "I want you to open up your windows and yell," and we were in the middle

00:30 of COVID and I desperately wanted to open up the windows and yell. I showed him how rageful I could

00:35 get.

00:35 Whatever you have to do, however long it takes.

00:40 I did not rewatch Fury Road before the audition, but I did rewatch the first 10 minutes of that

00:45 film pretty continuously throughout filming, not to pick up on any kind of performance,

00:51 but exclusively to see how the film was made. The average length of a shot in Fury Road, I think,

00:55 is about 1.3 seconds. Our shots are longer, but understanding how all of these images were going

01:01 to be woven together to fit the greater whole was really important.

01:05 Physically becoming Furiosa took, I think I trained for about a year, and I still don't

01:10 have my license. So the first thing I learned how to do in a car was a Juicy Lift 180, and then I

01:16 started the motorbikes. And I trained pretty hard. I did a lot of weights, and then once I got out to

01:22 Australia, I realized that I didn't need to train anymore because my day-to-day job was going to

01:27 train me for it. If you want to get fit, throw yourself on a war rig, get underneath it, to the

01:32 side of it, on top of it, you will come out ripped. I don't think I allowed myself to think about

01:38 crashing anything because usually you're driving directly at a camera, and it's usually manned by

01:44 somebody. And so I just attempted to be as astute as I could be and get as much sleep as I could

01:52 to make sure that I had my wits about me. The makeup was so much fun, particularly thinking

01:58 about the evolution of the character. You know, we begin with a character that we don't necessarily

02:04 recognize so much. I was so excited to shave my head for this movie. George very quickly said,

02:09 "It's not going to work with our schedule and the fact that we have to follow the character

02:13 throughout so many different stages in her life." It was just an incredible prosthetic. And we also

02:18 had a prosthetic that I could actually shave off because that was something that was really

02:22 important to me. There was a prop that we gave more importance to as filming went on, and I

02:28 really wanted to shave my head with that prop. And so George added a scene and we did it. But that is

02:33 such hard work. That's every single hair hand-woven into a skullcap. Finally, when I did end up in

02:42 the guess-up and garb, it was really exciting because when I stepped out of the trailer,

02:46 everybody was just like, "Wow!" And I was like, "Yes! It worked!" I was about six hours in the

02:52 makeup chair. What I find really funny about the progressive gnarliness, as you say, is I don't

02:58 have a very clean career. If you look at my track record, I've been pretty darcy and pretty bloody.

03:04 This film is on another level. I think there were eight levels of grime at my darciest that we went

03:11 through every single day. It was pretty wild. George Miller is so on top of everything. I say

03:21 that he paints his scenes because I really do mean that. Absolutely everything that you see

03:26 on screen has been hand-selected, hand-painted by George. There were moments where my schedule was

03:32 crazy on this movie, and when I wasn't on main unit, I was on second unit. And you could do

03:37 12 takes of something and send them off to George for him to review, and then he would send back

03:42 a note saying, "Do it all over again because her hat has to be two inches off of her forehead,

03:46 not one." That's the level of detail that we're talking about here. And it was a really extraordinary

03:52 experience as an actor because I feel like my job is to be able to either hide or telegraph

03:58 the way that I'm feeling based off of a whole array of instruments. And for a large portion

04:04 of the film, George had such a specific vision of how he wanted me to hold my face that he only

04:10 really gave me my eyes. And that can be terrifying as a performer, but if you're going to do that,

04:16 you do it with George Miller and you do it in Mad Max. I did as many of my stunts as I was allowed

04:20 to do. That was something that was present in the first conversation I had with George,

04:24 but I also have the most incredible stunt double, Hayley Wright, and she and I trained daily.

04:31 We shot a sequence called "Stairway to Nowhere" for about eight months, and it was eight months

04:37 of daily work. If I was not on main unit, I was on second unit shooting "Stairway to Nowhere."

04:41 And without giving too much away, it is a journey of a set piece. And when I finally

04:48 got on top of the war rig, I was so happy because I didn't have to be underneath it anymore.

04:53 So I think when I finally got to jump on the Carbonator, I was just like, "Yes! Okay, I'm here."

04:59 It's so exciting that this movie's going to Cannes. The first and only time I've been

05:04 was to receive a Chopin Award from Charlize Theron. It's kind of crazy that I'm going back

05:10 with this film now, and I cannot wait. I'm so excited to be there with everybody. And they

05:15 love George Miller so much that I think that's going to really add to the specialness.

05:19 I literally finished "Furiosa." I went on a press tour for my film "The Menu" for two weeks,

05:23 and the day I landed back in LA, Denis called me and said, "Get on a plane. You're coming to

05:27 Namibia." And it was beautiful because we finished off on the beach, and the last thing we had to do

05:33 was scale the dune back up again. And if you've ever walked in sand, you know that it's hardcore

05:37 to do that. And they had just finished an epic movie. I was just coming off of "Furiosa," and I

05:42 think by the time we crested the dune, we were just like, "Oh my God, we did it. We did it. We're

05:48 alive." I think the most heartwarming thing about "The Secret of Dune" is we all kept it for Denis.

05:54 Denis desperately wanted to pull this off. And if you've met him or you admire him, you know that

06:00 he is just the most wonderful person. And his energy towards filmmaking is so infectious that

06:06 the idea that there was only 12 people in the world, most of that being the skeleton crew that

06:11 we took to Namibia to shoot this scene, that we were all sitting on this secret, that was

06:16 really exciting and thrilling to be a part of.

06:18 [MUSIC PLAYING]

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