Director George Miller has confirmed Mad Max 5 is a Furiosa prequel, but it won’t star Charlize Theron. Thanks to Theron’s performance as the character in 2015’s Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road, Imperator Furiosa has quickly come to be regarded one of the greatest action movie heroines in recent memory (if not all-time). In many ways, she’s as much Fury Road‘s protagonist as Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky and the relationship between the two of them forms the bedrock of the film’s narrative.
Clearly, Miller finds Furiosa as compelling as everyone else does, and it’s been reported for years now he hopes to make both a Fury Road sequel titled Mad Max: The Wasteland as well as a spinoff focused on a younger Furiosa. Most recently, it came to light the filmmaker has auditioned actors like Anya Taylor-Joy for a Furiosa movie, in the hopes of beginning filming next year. And while it wasn’t clear if Taylor-Joy’s in the running to take over the Furiosa role from Theron, that appears to be the plan, based on Miller’s latest comments.
Speaking to the NYT, Miller confirmed he’s working on a Furiosa prequel based on the script he and Fury Road co-writer Nick Lathouris put together years ago (even before Fury Road hit theaters). He also said Theron won’t reprise her Mad Max role, admitting he considered de-aging her with CGI in the film for a long time. However, after seeing the CGI de-aging effects in The Irishman, he feels the technology isn’t where he wants it to be just yet:
For the longest time, I thought we could just use CG de-aging on Charlize, but I don’t think we’re nearly there yet. Despite the valiant attempts on ‘The Irishman,’ I think there’s still an uncanny valley. Everyone is on the verge of solving it, particular Japanese video-game designers, but there’s still a pretty wide valley, I believe.
Miller has a point; as much as everyone would love for Theron to return as Furiosa in a prequel, she would likely end up looking distractingly weird after undergoing CGI de-aging (much like the actors in The Irishman). It also sounds like the film will take place long before the events of Fury Road, exploring Furiosa’s life in her idyllic childhood home (the “Green Place”) and her experiences with the Vuvalini warrior women, prior to her being enslaved to serve Immorten Joe. If so, it would make more sense to cast someone younger like Taylor-Joy in the lead. Miller actually did something similar with Fury Road, bringing in the more age-appropriate Hardy to play Max after Mel Gibson portrayed the character in the original Mad Max trilogy.
Considering Miller used the Furiosa prequel script to help flesh out the character’s backstory for Theron on Fury Road (as he confirmed to the NYT), it sounds like it has the potential to expand the Mad Max mythology in compelling ways, as opposed to merely being a reverse-engineered attempt to cash-in on Furiosa’s popularity after Fury Road. And of course, if the prequel is a success, that improves the odds of Miller making The Wasteland shortly after, with Theron possibly returning as Furiosa once more. But before any of that happens, Miller’s going to shoot his next movie (the fantasy romance Three Thousand Years of Longing), so it may be a while before we get another major Mad Max 5 -related update.
