Furiosa director reveals why Anya Taylor-Joy only has 30 lines

Despite being the star of the Mad Max prequel Furiosa, Anya Taylor-Joy only has 30 lines of dialogue throughout the two-hour runtime, but director George Miller explained so that the plot could move at a quicker pace.

“The problem with dialogue is that it tends to slow things down,” Miller told The Telegraph. “Film is a medium often best enjoyed at high speed.”

Miller took this same approach with Tom Hardy‘s character in the first Mad Max movie, but he had a little more than double compared to Taylor-Joy with 63 lines.

Not having much dialogue in a movie like Furiosa does make sense, as most of the scenes shown in the trailer are focused on driving and maneuvering war vehicles, so there’s not a lot of room for talking.

The lack of dialogue may make some audiences nervous, but Miller managed to flesh out Hardy’s character in Mad Max on very little lines, so there’s proof he could do the same for Taylor-Joy.

And it seems like Miller is keen to have his two silent leads share the screen if only for a moment as he revealed Max will be making a cameo in the prequel.

“In doing what we did in the preparation of Mad Max: Fury Road, we also wrote what happened to Max in the year before we encounter him in [that film],” Miller explained to Entertainment Weekly.

“And as we get towards the end of this movie, the chronology… basically, we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened. The writers know what happened to Mad Max in that year before, and we have a whole story of that, which I would like to do sometime if I get the chance.”

Furiosa drives into theaters on May 24. In the meantime, check out the best new movies to stream this month and take a look our guide to the best TV shows to watch in 2024 so far.