Mad Max: The Real Reason Anya Taylor-Joy Replaced Charlize Theron As Furiosa

Fans of "Mad Max: Fury Road" are getting pumped for director George Miller's highly anticipated prequel "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga." Still, many might be asking one big question: why is Anya Taylor-Joy playing the lead character instead of Charlize Theron, who originated the role of the desert warrior in "Fury Road"?

Miller sat down with Empire Magazine to clear that up (via IGN), and his reasoning is honestly pretty sound — he didn't want to employ tricky de-aging technology to Theron and run the risk of that becoming a huge distraction. If the timeline had been different, Theron could have played Furiosa twice, but as Miller told the outlet, he didn't feel like de-aging techniques should be the defining story surrounding "Furiosa."

"It definitely would have been Charlize [had Furiosa been filmed before 'Fury Road']," Miller said. "I began thinking, 'Oh, maybe we could do de-aging.' Then I watched really masterful filmmakers like Ang Lee and Martin Scorsese, doing 'Gemini Man' and 'The Irishman,' and I saw that it hadn't been licked. All you'd be watching is, 'Look how well the technology works?' It would not have been persuasive." So how did Miller and his team end up choosing Taylor-Joy for the role?

In that same interview, George Miller pointed out that Anya Taylor-Joy has something major in common with Charlize Theron — both the "Queen's Gambit" star and the Oscar winner studied ballet when they were younger. Taylor-Joy trained as a dancer until she was 15 (and was spotted in London by a model scout shortly thereafter), and Theron attended the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City for a short time before a knee injury made it impossible for her to continue dancing. Ballet is an extraordinarily precise art, and it makes perfect sense that two actresses — who, as it happens, are also both known for the intensity they bring to their roles — who trained as ballet dancers would bring the same innate quality to Furiosa.

"There's an innately resolute quality in [Taylor-Joy]," Miller said. "She's a very determined and rigorous person. She has a mystique about her. And she'd been trained young as a ballet dancer. Charlize trained young as a ballet dancer. There's a precision to them that was needed." Based on the trailers, Taylor-Joy certainly does bring quite a bit of precision to the role of Furiosa, and based on her performances in films like "The Northman," audiences know that she's particularly excellent at playing resolute characters.

Throughout her relatively brief career — her breakthrough role only came in 2015 thanks to Robert Eggers' horror film "The Witch" — Anya Taylor-Joy has racked up a pretty impressive resumé of roles and accolades, including a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her role as Beth Harmon in the Netflix original series "The Queen's Gambit." (She was nominated for an Emmy but ultimately lost to Kate Winslet for her leading role in "Mare of Easttown.") Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Taylor-Joy, though, is her sheer versatility.

Whether she's leading a Netflix series, dabbling in social satire with "The Menu," popping up in ambitious movies like "Last Night in Soho," or portraying the title character in the Jane Austen adaptation "Emma," Taylor-Joy always seems like the perfect fit — and she's spent her career seamlessly moving between smaller independent projects and enormous franchises. Even now, as the world gets ready to see her join the "Mad Max" franchise in "Furiosa," she's already appeared in two of the biggest movies in recent memory. 

Taylor-Joy lent her voice to "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," the second-highest-grossing film of 2023, and she appears ever-so-briefly in 2024's "Dune: Part Two," which is still blowing away everyone at the box office. (Odds are that she'll also play a huge role in its eventual sequel "Dune: Messiah.") Taylor-Joy is a rare breed of actor in that she's simultaneously a box-office draw and a critical darling, and she'll continue proving that in "Furiosa."