Furiosa: George Miller Reveals Why Charlize Theron Didn’t Return for New Mad Max

Furiosa: A Mad Mad Saga director George Miller has provided a few more details about the process by which he decided to recast the role, originally played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. Not for the first time, he blamed the CGI de-aging technology, saying it wasn’t where it needed to be in order to tell a story that took place 20+ years before the previous film. The original plan was for Theron to reprise her role in the prequel, but it didn’t take long before that idea was off the table. Instead, New Mutants star Anya Taylor-Joy will play the role in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

Not long after Mad Max: Fury Road hit theaters, filmmaker George Miller was pressed for a follow-up. The box office phenomenon had landed some Academy Award nominations in big categories — a rarity for a tentpole blockbuster — and it was clear that the movie’s breakout star was Furiosa, the antiheroine played by Theron. 

“So, everyone read a script a few years ago, the concept art and everything, and everyone read the screenplay in order to do Fury Road, not just the actors but everybody,” Miller told ComicBook. “[Charlize] read it about six months before, and she said ‘We’ve got to do this first.’ I said, Charlize, we’ve been trying to do this movie for almost a decade and we’re all prepared to do this one. We have to do it, but she was very excited about it.”

“My intention was that we do it, we do it next,” Miller added. “But then we’ve now gone through the third parent company of Warner Bros. — there’s about four different regimes.That settled down by the time we got to actually do Furiosa, but the best part of a decade had gone by. And then I thought, ‘OK, we could still do it with Charlize.’ Then I saw these other movies like The Irishman, where they made people younger and particularly I saw Gemini Man. I was looking at was the technology; I wasn’t looking at performance. I thought, ‘We can’t do it.’”

That was back to the drawing board, with Miller admitting that he had no ready second choice after Theron, so the search was on to find a replacement.

In Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, 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.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is set to hit theaters on May 24th.