George Miller Cast Anya Taylor-Joy in FURIOSA After Watching LAST NIGHT IN SOHO
When I first saw Anya Taylor-Joy in the 2015 horror film The Witch, I knew she was going to be a big star. She’s just such a majorly talented actress, and she is blowing up right now. Every role that she takes on she’s awesome in! She just continues to impress, and I was excited to learn that she was cast as the young version of Furiosa in George MIller’s upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road sequel.
It turns out that Miller wasn’t familiar with Anya Taylor-Joy’s work until he attending an early screening of Edgar Wright’s upcoming film Last Night in Soho! He had never seen The Witch or even The Queen’s Gambit, but after watching her in Last Night in Soho, he knew he found his leading lady.
In a recent issue of Empire, Wright and Miller had a conversation about each other’s work and during that conversation, Miller brought up the moment he realized Taylor-Joy could be his young Furiosa:
“I’d known about Anya but I’d never seen her in a film until I saw her in Soho. And I remember thinking, ‘Gee, she’s interesting.’ I started to say to you, ‘I’m looking for someone to cast as Furiosa,’ and I barely got the sentence out before you said, ‘Don’t go any further, she’s great, she’s gonna be huge. She’s fantastic to work with.’ You were so emphatic about it.”
Miller has yet to meet the actress in person because of the pandemic, but he has talked to her several times. He went on to talk about her audition for the role saying:
“I said to her, ‘I’d like you to do a very simple test, which is read something to camera.’ And it was the speech from Network. The ‘I’m mad as hell’ speech. Apart from the brilliance of the writing, it’s a piece that can be done to camera. It doesn’t need an acting partner. Anya did one version, which was really good. Then I gave her just a couple of simple notes about intention and she just absolutely nailed [it]. I think it was done on an iPhone. I sent it to the studio. I explained why I thought she was right for the role. I said I was really happy to talk about it but it was so persuasive that we didn’t need to talk. The studio said, ‘Tick.’”
Well, it’s great that Miller ended up watching Last Night in Soho! If he didn’t he might have cast a totally different actress!
The movie is set to start shooting next year, and Chris Hemsworth is also set to star in it. Miller talked about this project and character in the past saying, “Yeah, she’s a pretty compelling character so it would be great to tell her story. Her backstory is really interesting. We only allude to it in this movie because this movie is on the run; people don’t have much time for recreational talk. But you pick up, you have a sense of her having gone through stuff. That’s what the film is trying to do. You’re trying to put a lot of iceberg under the tip, I like saying. One of the things that’s really gratifying, people are reading the film more than just the surface — the events of the movie, and just picking up a lot of stuff underneath it, which is very deliberate......So in many ways, the audience is picking up a lot about Furiosa — or enough to intrigue. And she’s got an interesting story."
When previously talking about joining Furiosa, Taylor-Joy said, “I fell in love with Furiosa because of the way Charlize presented her. She did such an incredible job. It was so beautiful. I can’t even think about trying to step into her shoes. It has to be something different because it just can’t be done. […] I’ve already started dreaming about [Furiosa] and she’s coming in very strong. I’m so committed to working as hard as possible as I can. I always said that I wanted a role that I would have to give everything to, it wouldn’t just be my mind but my body, what I’m doing with myself when I’m not on set. I’m so excited for that and to push myself past the limits of what my brain thought was possible.”
Furiosa is currently scheduled to open in theaters on June 23, 2023.