Furiosa Wins Best Female Character (Golden Issue Awards 2024)

This year brought with it the arrival of some of the most anticipated cinematic projects of the past decade. With Hollywood first facing setbacks due to the coronavirus pandemic, which was then followed by last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes, 2024 paid off the promise of projects that have been gestating for years. Fans were treated to a wealth of compelling adventures, and while they all brought with them plenty of bombast, the best films of the year also had gripping characters at their core. This is especially true when it came to reflecting on the best female characters that movie audiences spent time with.

Landing in theaters this year were prequels like Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and A Quiet Place: Day One, sequels like Dune: Part Two and Inside Out 2, and the big-screen adaptation of the immensely successful play Wicked. While all of these films had complex characters and layered storytelling, the actual stories being told couldn’t be further from one another. Whether it be characters like Chani, Furiosa, or Sam attempting to survive dangerous conditions, or characters like Anxiety or Elphaba trying to find their place in the world, the personal journeys these characters embarked upon ran the gamut of emotions. Still, only one female character could be crowned our favorite of 2024.

And the winner of the 2024 ComicBook Golden Issue Award for Best Female Character is…

Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga!

To say that Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa was the breakout character from 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road would be a bit of an understatement, as her resourcefulness and intensity made her steal the show from Tom Hardy’s titular Max. In that sense, Taylor-Joy had her work cut out for her when it came to bringing Furiosa’s earlier years to life, even with the support of director George Miller.

Fans of The Witch, Split, The Northman, and even Queen’s Gambit had a good idea that the actor was up for the task, but even after seeing her skills in those previous efforts, no one could have prepared for how much ass she would kick as Furiosa.

Part of the power of Taylor-Joy’s performance in the film is that, while audiences saw a fully formed Furiosa in Fury Road, this prequel had to explore the evolution of the figure, from being in servitude of a deadly gang to her escape and resourcefulness on War Rigs and eventually towards getting her revenge against Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus. Not only did Miller’s script make good on the decade-long promise of diving deeper into how Furiosa became the warrior seen in Fury Road, but his skills as a storyteller were fully matched in the ferocity with which Taylor-Joy took on the role.

As a testament to how devoted the actor was to the role, she attempted to shave her head to replicate Furiosa’s signature buzzcut, with it being Miller who intervened to prevent her from such a sacrifice.

Even though the clever use of makeup and wigs allowed the actor to embrace the intimidating appearance debuted by Theron, Taylor-Joy threw herself into the role to deliver viewers the captivating journey of a woman who had all of the cards stacked against her, only to triumph over one threat after the next. While anyone who can survive the apocalyptic wastelands of the franchise has to be physically and emotionally hardened, Miller and Taylor-Joy managed to find ways to show the humanity underneath the bruised, battered, and bloody facade of the character, as well as fully lean into the high-octane excitement of the series.

Anyone who had even a modicum of doubt about Furiosa only had to watch the movie for themselves to see that Anya Taylor-Joy, George Miller, and Furiosa herself fully lived up to the expectations that have been building for the better part of the decade, cementing the figure as the Best Female Character of 2024.

The nominees for the 2024 ComicBook Golden Issue Award for Best Female Character are:

• Anxiety (Maya Hawke, Inside Out 2)
• Chani (Zendaya, Dune: Part Two)
• Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo, Wicked)
• Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga) – WINNER 
• Sam (Lupita Nyong’o, A Quiet Place: Day One)