Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga's Chris Hemsworth Reveals the Surprising Inspiration for His Character

Hemsworth teases his new villain, Dementus.

By Jenna Anderson

Mad Max will soon be getting the cinematic spotlight again, thanks to the upcoming prequel film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The live-action blockbuster not only features Anya Taylor-Joy in the titular role of young Furiosa, but Chris Hemsworth as her antagonist, Warlord Dementus. In a recent interview with Total Film, Hemsworth spoke about the unconventional inspiration for his Furiosa role, which partially involved journaling from the point of view of his character.

"George suggested to me to journal as the character, which I hadn't done before," Hemsworth explained. "It was 2am one night. I was awake, and I just put pen to paper, and just started scribbling down thoughts and ideas as Dementus. I didn't think much of it. I went to sleep, and woke up, and was quite shocked at what came out of me in that half-asleep state. I went into rehearsal, and showed George, and we both went, 'That's it. That's the direction we've got to go."

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.'"

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"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.

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