What Happened on the 'Furiosa' Set??

The New York Times published a profile of Anya Taylor-Joy on Sunday, timed to coincide with the release of Furiosa, the prequel to 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. The story focuses largely on details related to the forthcoming film—and includes some rather eyebrow-raising comments about the production. “I’ve never been more alone than making that movie," Taylor-Joy said. "I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.” Hmm. Sounds like a something of a union grievance, if you ask me. But Taylor-Joy got far more cryptic in her interview with the Times's Kyle Buchanan, going on to say that she spent "months" on the movie's set without uttering a solitary line of dialogue. In an interview with The Telegraph, director George Miller confirmed that Taylor-Joy's character—the titular role—only has about 30 lines. Personally, getting an A-lister's salary without having to memorize many lines sounds ideal to me, but if Taylor-Joy's comments are any indication, the role had its own...unique share of problems. “I do want to 100 percent 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 at one point in the Times interview. “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.” Strenuous!! The interview builds to a bizarre moment that Buchanan was kind enough to detail for us to cringe at. When prompted about the most difficult part of the process, she paused for "five long seconds" then replied: “Next question, sorry. Talk to me in 20 years. Talk to me in 20 years.” Girl. We who delight in mess don't have that kind of patience. Many online—including Buchanan himself—have already drawn parallels between Taylor-Joy's experience and that of Charlize Theron, who played an older iteration of Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, which Miller also directed. Reports that Theron and her co-star Tom Hardy weren't fond of each other floated around for years, until Theron recalled to Vanity Fair in 2022: "It was like two parents in the front of the car. We were either fighting or we were icing each other—I don’t know which one is worse—and they had to deal with it in the back. It was horrible! We should not have done that; we should have been better. I can own up to that." “I wanted to be changed,” Taylor-Joy said of beginning production of Furiosa. “I wanted to be put in a situation in extremis where I would have no choice but to grow. And I got it.” For better—and seemingly almost certainly for worse. I don't know about you, but I'm setting a timer for the publication of her tell-all in 20 years.