How Anya Taylor-Joy took over Australian cinema’s most iconic franchise

After spending the better part of a year on location in Sydney and Broken Hill surrounded by local cast and crew, with co-star Chris Hemsworth hammily screeching in her ear and director Dr George Miller putting her through all sorts of punishing set-ups for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, you’d imagine Anya Taylor-Joy might be well sick of Australians by now.

“Not sick of Australians at all,” she says in her beguiling transatlantic accent, while back in Sydney to promote the latest instalment of Miller’s dystopian epic. “Actually, it was lovely when I landed into Sydney Airport; it felt like home. I just know the city so well now.”

Typical movie star patter, you might say. But she sure looks at home, sitting against the backdrop of the Opera House with her legs tucked under herself, wearing an oversized white leather jacket with lapels that almost envelop her. At the film’s premiere at the State Theatre the following day, she’ll traipse the red carpet spiked in arrows, looking like Saint Sebastian of Starlets, in a vintage dress from Paco Rabanne’s spring/summer 1996 collection. Unable to wrap his arm around her or stand anywhere near close enough, her co-star Hemsworth will hover beside her awkwardly as photographers snap their pictures.

She spent about 6½ months here in total during the shoot, she says, based mainly in “Paddo” in the inner city (yes, she’s even adopted our lingo), besides a trek out to rural NSW to film on the franchise’s iconic “red earth”. “It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my adult life,” Taylor-Joy, now 28, says matter-of-factly.

“The schedule was unbelievably gruelling. I was mostly doing six-day weeks. But any opportunity I got, I definitely made the most of being able to not only see the city, but also check out the natural swimming spots that I could. I love cold-water swimming. Bronte. I love Bronte,” she says. If I was the mayor of Bronte Beach, I’d put this on a sign somewhere.

Her Australiana fixation doesn’t end there. On this promotional trip, she’s even been travelling with Nick Cave’s book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, and utters an audible “eek” when I tell her our prince of darkness is literally performing around the corner in two days.

“Wait, he’s here?” she asks excitedly, rattling together her long red fingernails. “As soon as we’re done with this interview, I’m gonna look that up! I’m obsessed with Nick Cave. I just love him.” (In case her wedding pics – which she posted to Instagram just last month after secretly marrying her partner, musician Malcolm McRae, in 2022 – didn’t telegraph it, Taylor-Joy is partial to the dark side. “I’ve always been a Goth,” she says. “I never dreamt about a wedding; the only thing I ever dreamt about was having anatomically correct heart cakes, and they were delicious.” )

After her breakout as Thomasin in Robert Eggers’ A24 pilgrim horror, The Witch (2015) – her debut film role, and one she savvily chose over a Disney Channel pilot she’d been offered on the same day – and her mesmerising work as the drug-addled chess master Beth Harmon in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit (2020), a performance that won her a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, entering Miller’s Mad Max universe is arguably Taylor-Joy’s biggest gig yet, and not least because she’s taking over one of modern cinema’s most revered leads.

Released in 2015 after decades of production hell, Mad Max: Fury Road was a monumental smash for Miller, earning critical and fan praise, six Oscar wins and about US$380 million ($578 million) in box office receipts (it ended as the 21st highest-grossing film of the year globally), and reviving a franchise that had laid dormant since 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Much of the film’s appeal lay in Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa, a shaved head, one-armed, arse-kicking rebel on a mission to rescue five wives from the abuse of the wasteland warlord Immortan Joe and take them to the Green Place, the idyllic matriarchy where she grew up. Amid the bubbling pre-#MeToo environment of its release, Furiosa’s feminist allegory was a radical salve.

The film’s success made a prequel, delving further into Furiosa’s already detailed origin story, a no-brainer. But with Miller initially considering rejecting the idea of using de-ageing technology on Theron, it also pointed to a potential landmine for whoever was tasked with stepping into Theron’s formidable boots.

“I fell in love with Furiosa through Charlize, as did everybody in the world. But if you as a performer are getting caught up trying to do something that’s mimicking somebody else, you’re inevitably going to lose,” Taylor-Joy says. “And so my responsibility was to tell the story of the person in this script. And it was such a vastly different script from Fury Road, and George had such a set idea about how he wanted her to be, that I just did my best with that.”

If Fury Road was a thrash metal tune, a lean idea expressed with a frenzied verve, Furiosa is a symphony in five parts. It’s a sprawling epic, made with a cast and crew of more than 3000 people, covering the 16 years leading into Fury Road and Furiosa’s journey from innocent child to tormented mercenary. Taylor-Joy splits the role with 14-year-old actor Alyla Browne, and when she does arrive on screen about halfway through the film’s 148-minute runtime, she spends much of the performance in silence, those doe eyes and a rugged physicality (that she attributes to her childhood ballet training) doing all of the talking.

Miller says he first pictured Taylor-Joy in the role after seeing her performance in director Edgar Wright’s 2021 swinging ’60s throwback, Last Night in Soho. “This was just at the beginning of COVID, and Edgar showed me an early cut. I was struck by her,” he says.

“It’s an intuitive response, first of all – but also, she was so timeless. There was something intense and fierce about her. It seemed to overlap with the character that we had before [in Fury Road], and she had big shoes to fill. I started to talk to Edgar about her and without hesitation, he said, ‘Do it, do it!’ He said she’s the full article, she’s got everything, she can do anything, and it proved to be the case.”

Miller asked her to audition by reciting Peter Finch’s “I’m mad as hell …” monologue from Sidney Lumet’s 1976 satire Network, a scene urging the underclass to tap into their righteous fury to demand the world be remade for the better. Taylor-Joy did two or three takes, tightening her audition in real-time as Miller offered notes.

“As I got to know her and talk to her and prepare her for the film, I realised she had all the makings of all that was required to take on this role,” says Miller. “I mean, I’m kind of shocked by how young she still is and yet she was able to take it on. I think it’s intrinsic to her, plus she has the skill level.”

In the film’s production notes, Taylor-Joy mentions she went method for the role, something she doesn’t generally do. “Ok, I think this has been confused and it’s kind of, like, annoying me,” she says with playful irritation when I ask her to elaborate.

“I have never wanted to be a method actor. What I was saying was – and I think most actors will agree with me on this – characters influence the way you behave. You’re spending 16 hours a day being somebody else, of course they influence you. But with Furiosa, I knew it would be an experience that I would have to live in real time. The second I read the script, I knew it was going to be something that I was just going to have to feel.

“I was really lucky that the crew and I got along so well, but it was an unbelievably isolating experience,” she adds. “She’s a very isolated character. Despite the fact that I had cast members I really loved, I was just very much away from them. And also the schedule that I was on – if I wasn’t on main unit, I was on second unit, so I was just working the whole time.”

In Hollywood, the trajectory of any hot young breakout is a whirlwind and Taylor-Joy has felt it vividly since the success of The Queen’s Gambit, treading odd roles in foodie satire The Menu (2022); a return trip with Eggers in viking epic The Northman (2022); and as the voice of Princess Peach in the box office-breaking animated film, The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023). This year, she had a cameo as Reverend Mother Alia Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, hinting at a bigger role to come in its next sequel, and Furiosa also feels part of this considered direction towards grand, physically demanding blockbusters.

“I feel like I’m kind of stepping into a new era in terms of [picking roles] because for the longest time, I didn’t realise that people took breaks between projects and so I just kept saying yes to these unbelievable opportunities,” she says. “I was really interested – solely, really – in character and story. And I think working non-stop for 10 years, I’m now lucky enough to have the experience of, like, okay, I’ve done a lot, what do I want to do that’s new? What do I want to do that forces me to evolve? I’m really not interested in resting on my laurels, I constantly want to be growing. So I’m hoping that I can say yes to more opportunities for growth.”

In May 2021, during her monologue while hosting US sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, the Miami-born, Buenos Aires-raised Taylor-Joy asked for permission to start the show in “my native language”, launching into a porteño lilt that would’ve surprised viewers more familiar with her British accent. It felt like half a move towards opening up her onscreen persona.

“People have no idea! It’s confusing to me,” she says of presumptions around her identity. “But it’s a huge part of who I am. And in this industry, I don’t often get the opportunity to have that element of myself be brought into it. Like, I would love to make a movie in Spanish, that would be so incredible. Not only for me but for my family, too. I’m a very proud Latina.”

With Furiosa, the attraction hinged on the prospect of working with Miller, the scale of the project, and the rare allure of grunt work, all that physical training and precision stunt work that appealed to her “ballet brain and perfectionist brain”. Like the pulverised heads of Furiosa’s victims, you sense Taylor-Joy extracted as much from the role as Miller drew from her.

“I remember when I saw Fury Road, it’s easily one of my top three movie-going experiences ever. And I just remember thinking, I know that that is a one-of-a-kind experience. I know that working on that’s not going to be like absolutely anything else. And I was right,” says Taylor-Joy.

“You’re talking about a film set that begins with ‘start your engines’. Like, it’s not ‘camera, set, action’, it’s literally ‘start your engines’. As somebody that craves intensity, that’s something that just lit me up,” she adds. “And so there’s a very interesting kinship between people that have made Mad Max movies; we all know our own brand of crazy, and it’s just not like any other film set in the world. This whole experience has been entirely unique.”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opens in cinemas on May 23.

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