12 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Premiere Photos

For the first time in the Mad Max franchise, Furiosa doesn’t follow the title character Max, played originally by Mel Gibson and later by Tom Hardy in the 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.

Instead, it follows Taylor-Joy as Furiosa (who was played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road) and Hemsworth as her nemesis, Dementus. Furiosa is on her way home to the Green Place to reunite with her people.

Anya Taylor-Joy had her break out moment in 2015’s A24 horror movie The Witch. She went on to star in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016) and Glass (2019), and in 2020, she starred in Netflix’s 2020 limited series The Queen’s Gambit as a master chess player, which earned her further acclaim.

Since then, the British-Argentinian actress has appeared in several high-profile films including Last Night in Soho, The Menu, and Dune: Part Two. George Miller chose her for Furiosa after speaking with Soho director Edgar Wright.

“I knew from Edgar Wright just how good she was. And so that proved to be the case on this film — very, very rigorous about her role,” says Miller in our Furiosa cover story.

“I got a text from Edgar Wright, who said George Miller wants to talk to you, and immediately, just my whole body felt electrified,” says Taylor-Joy.

Hemsworth wears a prosthetic nose as the cruelly charismatic biker-chariot warlord Dementus. But he looked more like himself as the Furiosa premiere. 

Hemsworth is known for playing Thor in eight different Marvel movies, as well as for 2012’s Rush, 2011’s Cabin in the Woods, 2015’s In The Heart of the Sea, 2020’s Extraction, and 2022’s Spiderhead.

He told MovieMaker in our cover story that Furiosa was one of the greatest experiences of his career. 

“If he wasn’t a director,” jokes Hemsworth, “I’d love him to be my doctor.”

George Miller made his first short film, “Violence in the Cinema, Part 1,” back in 1971, during his medical residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. 

“Some of my family were saying, ‘You’re wasting a really good education to make films,’” he recalls. “But as time went on, and in recent years, I’ve come to realize how influential medical experience was on my filmmaking. I don’t think I’d still be making films, had it not been for my medical education.” 

The director is also known for Three Thousand Years of Longing, Happy Feet, and The Witches of Eastwick.

“George is the gentlest, sweetest man, and a complete genius,” Taylor-Joy says in our cover story. “It’s wonderful to work with him because he’ll have one idea, he’ll connect it to everything and just weave this tapestry together. And Chris and I had a really good time.”

“It’s a Mad Max film, so you know there will be a great deal of action and stunt work, and all of it intense,” says Taylor-Joy.

“I was really excited by the physical nature of the job and wanted to do as much as I was allowed, and George was really supportive of that. I trained for nearly a year before we started filming, alongside my incredible stunt double, Hayley Wright, who is just the best.

“I’m not sure I could choose a favorite stunt, but I did love the vehicles — although don’t ask me to choose a favorite among them!” 

Miller, Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth say Furiosa was a pleasant shoot. That was a relief given the well-documented Fury Road feud between Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy has been well-documented.)

“Anya, like Charlize, trained in ballet, which is really great for people doing their own stunts – the physicality of it. There’s that discipline, those micro-adjustments she can make,” says Miller.

Taylor-Joy adds: “I think anyone who has studied ballet would say it is a powerful basis for any physical work, so I think it has probably helped me in everything I’ve done.

“But certainly the endurance, the strength, the powerful core you develop and the grace, the coordination, the very basics of ballet, served as a strong base for me for this heavy action rock opera George created.” 

Hemsworth was a lifelong Mad Max fan. The Australian-originated franchise had always resonated with him as an Australian, and as “a kid in the backyard kind of recreating some of that fantasy.” 

But Fury Road went beyond that.

“I remember watching Fury Road in the Electric Cinema in London, and walking out and immediately calling my agent, saying, ‘This is the greatest film I’ve ever seen,’” Hemsworth says. 

“It was the first time in years that I was able to lose myself in the moment, or be immersed in the process of being a true fan and an audience member, without, you know, having worked in the industry, having to constantly sort of pick it apart and say, Oh, I wonder how they did that angle— or how they shot this, or about the score there, or this particular stunt. 

“All of that had kind of gone away, and I was back in the soup as a true fan, and it felt incredible. I wanted to be a part of something like that. I wanted to work with someone who has such scope and vision for telling stories on such an epic scale for a global audience, that resonates with just about anyone and everyone who comes in contact with it.”

“Furiosa was an instantly iconic character, in my opinion, and I loved the idea, and the challenge, of taking her back to her origins,” she says. “Charlize’s work was incredible, but I didn’t think about it as stepping into her shoes, rather making her what she was in this story, in the script, in my conversations with George. She’s alone, completely alone, and immediately I felt protective of her and that is strangely what carried me — us, Furiosa and I — through.”

Working on Furiosa reignited a passion for acting in Hemsworth.

“This was, I think, head and shoulders above any experience I’ve had on a set — working not only on something that was creatively fulfilling, but working with an individual who was inspiring and kind and passionate — it made me certainly go, This is how I want to spend my days,” says Hemsworth.

“And anything short of that would feel like a miss, you know? The bar’s been raised now and I’m gonna have to work pretty hard to have an experience like that again. But that’s what I’m hoping for and aiming for.”

When George Miller made the first Mad Max film in 1979, it was so challenging he almost quit filmmaking.

“When I made the first Mad Max it was so difficult and I was so bewildered that I really wasn’t going to continue making films. I was just incredibly grateful that the film earned the money that the investors put in. But I really thought I wasn’t a filmmaker after that film,” Miller recalls. 

“But then I remembered speaking to Peter Weir, who had already done two features, and he told me, ‘George, that’s always the case when you make films. He said you’ve got to think about it like you’re on patrol in Vietnam. … You’ve got your platoon, your mission. But you don’t know where the landmines are, or the snipers are, or, or any of that. And you’ve got to be agile and be able to adapt to whatever happens to complete your mission.’”

Editor’s Note: Corrects main image.