Mad Max: Charlize Theron Praises Anya Taylor-Joy’s Casting in Furiosa Prequel

Next year will bring the debut of Mad Max: Furiosa, the long-awaited prequel to the blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road. While Charlize Theron brought the beloved Imperator to life in Fury Road, the younger version of the character will be played by Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa. Based on a new interview, it sounds like Taylor-Joy has her predecessor’s endorsement. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Theron spoke about Taylor-Joy being cast in the role, and teased she “can’t think of a better actress” to carry the torch of Furiosa’s story.

“I met her years ago and I haven’t really been around her at a function or anything like that,” Theron explained. I think she’s going to be totally OK. Without talking to me, she’s going to be absolutely fine.”

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 will be written and directed by George Miller, and will also star Chris Hemsworth as Dementus.

“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 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.”

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Mad Max: Furiosa will be released in theaters on May 24, 2024.