Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’s Anya Taylor-Joy Teases Her Character’s Pivotal Injury

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga arrives in theaters in just a matter of weeks, catapulting the Mad Max franchise into new territory. The film will follow a young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) in her efforts to get revenge for the trauma she endured in her childhood, and fans have definitely be eager to see that story. Based on Mad Max: Fury Road and early marketing for Furiosa, it has been safe to assume that part of Furiosa’s origin story will involve the loss of her arm — and apparently, that moment will be instrumental to the story. While Taylor-Joy does not reveal exactly how Furiosa loses her arm, she teased in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that the moment is illuminating for her character.

“Both were important steps that we had to take if we were going to be able to chart the journey of how this little girl became a character that now we all know and love,” Taylor-Joy explained. “It made sense to me because I think what’s incredible about this character is she just refuses to die — really, she refuses. And it made sense to me that she would lose her arm in the pursuit of something that she thought was bigger than herself. That made a lot of sense to me.”

What Is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga About?

In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers, young Furiosa falls into the hands of a great biker horde led by the warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel, presided over by the Immortan Joe. As the two tyrants fight for dominance, Furiosa soon finds herself in a nonstop battle to make her way home. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is directed by George Miller, who co-wrote the film’s script with Nico Lathouris. The cast of the film also includes Tom Burke, Lachy Hulme, Nathan Jones, John Howard, Angus Sampson, Charlee Fraser, and Daniel Webber.

Why Is Mad Max Getting a Prequel?

As Miller has previously explained, he actually came up with the conceit of Furiosa while cracking the story for Fury Road — and felt that the story was too good not to tell in some capacity.

“When we wrote Mad Max, the task was to tell a story that was always on the run and to see how much the audience could pick up in passing,” Miller previously explained to The AV Club. “That was one of the tricks of Mad Max: Fury Road, that there would be references to things of where she’s from, why they’re doing things, but it was always on the run. There were very few moments of quiet. We never explained how she lost her arm. We never explain what the actual Green Place Of Many Mothers was. We never explained the workings of the Citadel. So we had the screenplay virtually complete before we shot Fury Road, and we did it because it arose out of wanting to explain to everybody who Furiosa was—to Charlize when she took on the role, and to all the actors and the designers and everybody else working on the Citadel and so on. The feeling was, gee, this is a pretty good screenplay, and then I kept saying to myself, ‘if Fury Road works, I’d really like to tell this story.’”

“So it came about, I’m not going to say accidentally, but it came out of a need to explain [Fury Road‘s] world which, as I said, essentially happened over three days and two nights,” Miller continued. “It’s really trying to explain how that world came to be. We also wrote, not a screenplay, but almost in novel form, Nico Lathouris and I, what happened to Max in that year before, and that’s something that we’ll look at further down the track later. But in telling each other the story of Furiosa, everything in Fury Road had to be explained. In my mind, I have a back story of the Doof Warrior, who plays the guitar. How could a blind man who all he can do is play a guitar, how does he get to survive in a wasteland where everybody is in extremis? How did he come to be there? So we wrote little stories for every character when we made Fury Road.”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is currently scheduled to be released in theaters on May 24th.