Rejoice, filming has started on Fury Road prequel Furiosa
Chris Hemsworth posted on social media today, stating that the Anya Taylor-Joy-starring Mad Max spinoff had begun production
Witness, rejoice, chrome, do not become addicted to water, etc.: George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road prequel Furiosa has apparently finally started filming.
This is per an Instagram post from one of the film’s stars, Chris Hemsworth, who wrote that “A new journey in the Mad Max saga begins,” while also showing off the new movie’s undeniably metal-looking logo.
Miller—who recently premiered his latest film, Three Thousand Years Of Longing, at Cannes—has been talking up the Furiosa movie pretty much since Fury Road became a massive hit for the now-77-year-old director. The film takes place well before that movie, though, i.e., however long it takes for new star Anya Taylor-Joy to age into Charlize Theron, who stole the show as the title character in the original.
Plot details about the prequel are nil, although we’ll presumably see Furiosa in service to a younger version of Fury Road villain Immortan Joe, played memorably by the late Hugh Keays-Byrne. Among other things, we have no clue yet who Hemsworth (gearing up for the promotional push for his latest Marvel film, Thor: Love And Thunder) will be playing, or actor Tom Burke, who reportedly replaced Matrix: Resurrections’ Yahya Abdul-Mateen II after the latter was forced to depart the project due to scheduling conflicts.
It is, obviously, a bummer that we won’t get more of Theron’s Furiosa in the film—she’d previously said that she was “a little heartbroken” about Miller’s decision to take the character into a prequel world where she, as a performer, couldn’t follow—but it’ll be fascinating to see Taylor-Joy take on the part. She’s done some action work in the past—the most recent entry probably being her turn as Marvel mutant Magic in The New Mutants, and a couple of attempted shankings in The Northman—but nothing really on the scale of Fury Road’s high-impact automotive combat.