‘Mad Max’ star tells how her challenging role helped her embrace inner female rage

Queen’s Gambit actor Anya Taylor-Joy has said that filming the forthcoming Mad Max prequel Furiosa helped her embrace her own female rage after years of getting angry on behalf of other people.

The 28-year-old stars as the titular character, a younger version of Charlize Theron’s Mad Max character Furiosa, who finds herself on a non-stop battle to find her way home.

Taylor-Joy has said she is “grateful” for her role in the George Miller film, because it allowed her to reflect on the ways she had expressed anger in the past.

“For a long time, the only time I ever got angry was on other people’s behalf. I’ve always internalised this thing of, ‘I’ve done something wrong. If you treat me badly, it’s because I am the problem’,” she said in an interview with British GQ.

“And I’m so grateful for Furiosa, because there was a real moment where I started getting angry for myself.”

The actor said people around her had noticed a shift after filming Furiosa, especially her husband Malcolm McRae, who was surprised by the change.

“My husband was like, ‘I’ve never heard you be like this.’ I was like, ‘I’m glad! I’m glad that I’m angry!’. If someone steps on me now I’m like, ‘Hey, f**k you!’. That makes me feel good.”

Taylor-Joy added that women were not always “dainty and unmessy”, and that she wanted her character to embody authentic human rage.

“I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for fighting for feminine rage, which is a strange thing, because I’m not promoting violence – but I am promoting women being seen as people,” she said.

In an interview with The New York Times, the US actor revealed she and director Miller (79) had disagreed on several occasions over how stoic her character Furiosa should be.

Taylor-Joy has only 30 lines of dialogue in the two-hour and 28-minute-long film. While Furiosa endures intense hardships throughout the film, she expresses emotions mainly through her eyes.

The lead in the film said she fought hard to get Miller to agree to include a scream in the dialogue, and that her character was expected to be “mouth closed, no emotion, speak with your eyes”.

“I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” she said. “We’re animals, and there’s a point where somebody just snaps. There’s one scream in that movie, and I am not joking when I tell you that I fought for that scream for three months.”

(© The Independent)

‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ will be released in cinemas tomorrow