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Anya Taylor-Joy Photo: Victor Chavez
Anya Taylor-Joy is definitely cool and definitely smart, but she still can’t even parallel park. The Dune: Part Two actor doesn’t have a driver’s license, despite the fact that she stars in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the biggest, fastest car movie of the year. “I’m never in one place long enough to get one,” Taylor-Joy said in a recent Variety cover story. “I also feel like I probably need to learn how to parallel park. That’s something I don’t know how to do.”
While this does seem pretty fucking insane from a safety perspective, it’s also very method for this franchise in particular. What is Mad Max about if not reckless driving? Is it more dangerous to drive without a piece of plastic in your pocket or with a dude playing electric guitar and an entire amp system on your hood? Obviously the latter! Taylor-Joy just had to manifest that everything would be okay. “I don’t think I allowed myself to think about crashing anything,” she said, adding that she’d simply try to get a little more sleep before shooting any chase scenes involving heavy machinery. (A necessary protection, as some of her call times were apparently as early as 1:45 a.m.)
Taylor-Joy’s co-star, Chris Hemsworth, said he wasn’t aware of her lack of a license at the time, which is probably for the best. “I think she automatically gets a license by default, doesn’t she?” he added, which means she must have done something right. He went on to imagine Taylor-Joy walking up to a desk at the DMV: “‘Here’s my driver’s test,’ she’d say, and hand them a ticket to Furiosa! And then the instructor should be like, ‘Oh yeah. We get it. You can do it!’”
Learning to drive wasn’t the only challenging thing Taylor-Joy did during Furiosa’s production, which primarily took place in Australia. She also told Variety about channeling the voice of Charlize Theron (who played her character in George Miller’s last Mad Max film, Fury Road), training to shoot guns and imitate their kick-back herself (the film didn’t use bullets or blanks in the weapons), and spending up to five hours in the makeup chair getting caked in layers and layers of fake dirt. “There were some days when I definitely needed to de-stress,” she said. “I developed a really strange addiction to stories about people who are fighting evil,” like Netflix’s Stranger Things. She even begged Miller to let her shave her actual hair for a scene, but he refused. “George is such a softie. He saw my hair and he said, ‘It’s beautiful. Don’t do it.’” They ended up using a bald cap instead.
All of this experience with leaning into danger seems to have gotten to Taylor-Joy’s head just a little bit. Now that she’s wrapped, “I know the exact kind of car I’m going to get… Ferrari Dino, in yellow.”
“My agents, my friends are like, ‘This is the dumbest thing in the world,’” she continued. “I’m like, ‘I’m attracted to this car. I need to have this car. I don’t care.’” She may soon come to terrorize the L.A. streets, but it really seems like Taylor-Joy was the perfect choice for this role.
