Anya Taylor-Joy seems borderline despondent after Furiosa production

On her Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga press tour, Anya Taylor-Joy has given reporters enough tidbits about the hardship she experienced behind the scenes to warrant a full, Hearts Of Darkness-style documentary follow-up. Don’t expect that project for at least two decades, though—it’ll be a while before Taylor-Joy is ready to really unpack everything that went down.

“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” the actor told New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan in a recent interview. “I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.” When pressed about what exactly those challenges were, Taylor-Joy got quiet. “Next question, sorry,” she said, apparently with a faraway look in her eyes. “Talk to me in 20 years… Talk to me in 20 years.”

While some on Twitter/X speculated that Taylor-Joy could be hinting that director George Miller was creepy or inappropriate in some way, she was very effusive toward him in the interview. “I do want to 100 percent preface this by saying I love George and if you’re going to do something like this, you want to be in the hands of someone like George Miller,” she said. Later, she explained that she always wanted to make sure he felt respected, even when she had her own suggestions for the character. “I wanted to make sure that I was never insolent in any way, that it was always a conversation,” she said. “At the end of the day, this is his vision.”

More likely, Taylor-Joy’s attitude came from the fact that—like its 2015 predecessor, Fury Road—the production for Furiosa sounds really fucking hard. In the NYT interview, she said that at one point she went “months” on the Australian set without speaking a single line, as Miller tried to get the film’s main action sequence exactly right. In a Variety cover story last week, she revealed that she once looked in the mirror and realized she “hadn’t seen anybody that wasn’t in wasteland hair and makeup in two months… I had not seen anybody looking regular.” She ended up adopting a cat because “my brain told me I needed something to nurture.”

“I will never regret this experience, on so many different levels, but it’s a very particular story to have,” she continued in the NYT piece. “There’s not everyone in the world that has made a Mad Max movie, and I swear to God, everyone that I’ve met that has, there’s a look in our eyes: We know. There’s an immediate kinship of like, ‘OK, hey, I see you.’” While she says she’s briefly met Charlize Theron, who played an older version of her character in Fury Road, the two are “due a sit-down, hash-it-out dinner.” It sounds like Theron would more than agree: in a 2015 oral history of her film, the actor said that “there’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.”

Almost a decade later, Taylor-Joy is using the same sort of language. While she hasn’t yet seen the final theatrical cut of the film, Taylor-Joy told Variety that “within the first three minutes [of watching an early, black-and-white cut], I’m crying… Afterward, I cannot speak. I found it very traumatizing to watch.” “I’m curious, once I watch it, if I’ll ever be able to watch it again,” she elaborated to the NYT.

You can watch Taylor-Joy’s massive lift for yourself when Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga rolls into theaters May 24.