Anya Taylor-Joy on Making 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' & Shaving Her Head for the Role

first time that I even heard that furiosa was a movie I got a text from Edgar Wright and he just said George Miller wants to speak to you and I had a feeling that it was going to be about this world he asked me to do a speech from Network which was the I want you to get mad speech which makes a lot of sense well I'm not going to leave you alone I want you to get mad it was actually really wonderful to deliver that monologue specifically at that point in time because it's very much I want you to open up your windows and yell and we were in the middle of Co and I desperately wanted to open up the windows and yell I showed him how rageful I could get whatever you have to do of a long intense I did not rewatch Fury Road before the audition but I did rewatch the first 10 minutes of that film pretty continuously throughout filming not to pick up on any kind of performance but exclusively to see how the film was made the average length of a shot in Fury Road I think is about 1.3 seconds our shots are longer but understanding how all of these images were going to be woven together to fit the greater hole was really important physically becoming furiosa took I think I trained for about a year and I still don't have my license so the first thing I learned how to do in a car was a juicy lift 18 AC and then I started the motorbikes and I trained pretty hard like I did a lot of weights and then once I got out to Australia I realized that I didn't need to train anymore because my day-to-day job was going to train me for it if you want to get fit throw yourself on a war rig get underneath it to the side of it on top of it you will come out ripped I don't think I allowed myself to think about crashing anything because usually you're driving directly at a camera and it's usually manned by somebody and so I just attempted to be as astute as I could be and get as much sleep as I could uh to make sure that I had my wits about me the makeup was so much fun particularly thinking about the evolution of the character you know we begin with a character that we don't necessarily recognize so much I was so excited to shave my head for this movie George very quickly said it's not going to work with our schedule and the fact that we have to follow the character throughout so many different stages in her life it was just an incredible prosthetic and we also had a prosthetic that I could actually shave off because that was something that was really important to me there was a prop that we gave more importance to as filming went on and I really wanted to shave my head with that prop and so George added a scene and we did it but that is such hard work that's every single hair handwoven into a skull cap finally when I did end up in the guess up and Garb it was really exciting cuz when I stepped out of the trailer everybody was just like wow and I was like yes it worked that was about 6 hours in the makeup chair what I find really funny about the progressive gnarliness as you say is I don't have a very clean career if you look at my track record I've been pretty Dary and pretty bloody this film is on another level like I think there were eight levels of grime at my darus that we went through every single day it was pretty wild George Miller is so on top of everything I say that he paints his scenes because I really do mean that absolutely everything that you see on screen has been hand selected hand painted by George there were moments where my schedule was crazy on this movie and when I wasn't on main unit I was on second unit and you could do 12 takes of something and send them off to George for him to review and then he would send back a note saying do it all over again because her hat has to be 2 in off of her forehead not one that's the level of detail that we're talking about here and it was a really extraordinary experience as an actor because I feel like my job is to be able to either hide or Telegraph the way that I'm feeling based off of a whole array of instruments and for a large portion of the film George had such a specific vision of how he wanted me to hold my face that he only really gave me my eyes and that can be terrifying as a performer but if you're going to do that you do it with George Miller and you do it in madmax I did as many of my stunts as I was allowed to do that was something that was present in the first conversation I had with George but I also have the most incredible stunt double Haley Wright and she and I trained daily we shot a sequence called stow away to Nowhere for about eight months and it was eight months of daily work if I was not on main unit I was on second unit shooting stow away to nowhere and without giving too much away it is a journey of a set piece and when I finally got on top of the war rig I was so happy cuz I didn't have to be underneath it anymore so I think when I finally got to jump on the carbonacea I was just like yes okay I'm here it's so exciting that this movie is going to can the first and only time I've been was to receive a chopar award from charl Thon it's kind of crazy that I'm going back with this film now and I cannot wait I'm so excited to be there with everybody and they love George Miller so much that I think that's going to really add to the specialness I literally finished furiosa I went on a press tour from my film the menu for 2 weeks and the day I landed back in La Denny called me and said get on a plane you're coming to Namibia and it was beautiful because we finished off on the beach and the last thing we had to do was scale the Dune back up again and if you've ever walked in sand you know that it's hardcore to do that and they had just finished an Epic movie I was you know just coming off of furious and I think by the time we cred the Dune we were just like oh my God we did it we did it we're alive I think the most heartwarming thing about the secret of Dune is we all kept it for Deni Deni desperately wanted to pull this off and if you've met him or you admire him him you know that he is just the most wonderful person and his energy towards film making is so infectious that the idea that there was only 12 people in the world most of that being the Skeleton Crew that we took to Namibia to shoot the scene that we were all sitting on the secret that was really exciting and thrilling to be a part of

Channel: Variety

Views: 229,667

Keywords: Variety, Variety Studio, anya taylor-joy, anya taylor joy, furiosa, mad max, furiosa mad max, furiosa a mad max saga, furiosa interview, anya taylor joy interview, anya taylor joy furiosa

Id: YyGmRA6gTlw

Length: 6min 28sec (388 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2024