Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Reveals First Look at Fury Road Villain’s Return

The first trailer for the long-awaited Mad Max: Fury Road prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, dropped today and it showcases Anya Taylor-Joy as the titular character, the role Charlize Theron originated back in 2015. It looks like Furiosa isn’t the only character George Miller is bringing back for the prequel. In the new trailer, you can spot Immortan Joe, the villain played by Hugh Keays-Byrne in Fury Road. Keays-Byrne also played Toecutter, the Mad Max villain in the original 1979 film. Sadly, Keays-Byrne passed away in 2020, but the younger version of Immortan Joe looks almost identical to the warlord fans love to hate from Fury Road. 

A moment in the trailer shows Immortan Joe facing off with Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, who the actor described as “a very violent, insane, brutal person that is born from the Wasteland” (via EW). While the actor taking on the role of Immortan Joe hasn’t been officially confirmed, people online are throwing out some guesses based on the cast list. For now, you can check out an image of Furiosa‘s Immortan Joe alongside Hemsworth’s Dementus below: 

What Is Mad Max: Furiosa About?

In Mad Max: Furiosa, as the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and 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. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.

The film also stars Tom Burke, Nathan Jones, Angus Sampson, and Quaden Bayles.

“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 24, 2024.