RIDE HISTORIC
LAST TIME GEORGE MILLER HEADED TO THE DESERT, WE GOT THE GENRE-DEFINING, FLAME-LICKED ACTION OPERA THAT IS MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. NOW HE’S BACK, WITH NEW STARS AND EVEN BIGGER IDEAS. FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT AND PREPARE TO WITNESS FURIOSA WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
Ten months, and more, of training had led her to this point: the moment when she was about to put pedal to the metal on the desert sand as the title character in George Miller’s Furiosa:
A Mad Max Saga. Motorbikes, cars, you name it, she had mastered it. She just couldn’t do it on a public road. “I still don’t have my licence, which I find hysterical,” she laughs. “I can pull some really crazy tricks in a car, and I have yet to be able to parallel park.”
No matter. There is no parallel parking on the Fury Road. There is only one direction: forward. Surrounded by other vehicles, Taylor-Joy and her cast-mates and cadre of stunt-drivers waited for the signal from the unassuming, bespectacled Miller. Then it came. “START YOUR ENGINES!”
So everyone did. “You wouldn’t be able to hear anything,” recalls Taylor-Joy. “You’d get a vague approximation of, ‘I think they yelled, “Action!” —let’s go for it!’ It’s a very rock ’n’ roll way to start a shoot.” But it’s very Mad Max, and oh so very George Miller. Start your engines, indeed. Furiosa is back, and she’s ready to ride eternal.
•••
The last time we saw Furiosa was almost a decade ago, when Miller returned to the world of Max Max, the world he created back in 1979, and delivered a masterpiece. Mad Max: Fury Road reintroduced us to the Road Warrior, Max ‘Mad’ Rockatansky (with Tom Hardy replacing Mel Gibson in the role), a wandering soul who travels across the irradiated Australian Outback in the wake of a globe-gutting nuclear conflagration, and usually winds up in hair-raising, high-speed chases. But there was more. Much more. Miller introduced a dizzying array of new characters and concepts —the Immortan Joe, a bloated warlord who rules over his people with an iron fist and plastic abs; the War Boys, his loyal, happy-to-die followers; the Five Wives, women the Immortan has imprisoned as chattel; places called the Bullet Farm, Gas Town and the Green Place.
And then there was the Imperator Furiosa. A one-armed warrior woman with a harsh buzz-cut and a harsher attitude (masking a deep wellspring of emotion), Furiosa was the driver of not only the story of Fury Road, but also the Immortan Joe’s colossal armoured truck, the War Rig. It is this that she steals at the beginning of the movie, having smuggled the Five Wives aboard it, in a desperate attempt to make
