Anya Taylor-Joy on “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” “Dune: Part Two,” and More For VARIETY Magazine

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Anya Taylor-Joy fronts this week’s cover of VARIETY and speaks with Co-Editor-In-Chief Ramin Setoodeh about “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” marrying musician Malcolm McRae, how she secured her surprise role in “Dune: Part Two,” and more.

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On why director George Miller wanted her to do takes with her mouth closed while filming “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”: “We’d do takes where he’d be like, ‘Do it again with your mouth closed.’ He has a thing about my mouth. He thinks when my mouth is open, I look too young…This is the wasteland, and any outbreak of emotion is punished by death. Any empathy is punished by death—any kindness, really. It all made sense to me. I think the restrictions that were placed on me by George did create a radiation off the character, because she is being suppressed continuously throughout the film.”

On her reaction to watching a rough cut of the film: “Within the first three minutes, I’m crying. And afterward, I cannot speak. I found it very traumatizing to watch.”

On how she de-stressed during filming: “There were some days when I definitely needed to de-stress. I developed a really strange addiction to stories about people who are fighting evil. I found real comfort in ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4. I had to have something on my phone that reminded me of the goodness in the world.”

On marrying musician Malcolm McRae in 2022: “It was magical…We were together not very long…When you know, you know…Malcolm FaceTimed his family from the church. We were like, ‘Hiii!’ But they knew—we were engaged for a little while. We got engaged while I was shooting ‘The Menu.’…We kept it a secret from our friends until some newspaper blew it up.”

On how she snagged the role as Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) younger sister, Alia, in “Dune: Part Two”: Taylor-Joy says she met with director Denis Villeneuve for another role in the “Dune: Part Two” before she left for Australia to shoot “Furiosa, ” but Villeneuve told her that Miller’s shooting schedule wouldn’t allow her to partake. “Before I even sat down, he was like, ‘I want you to be in “Dune,” but you can’t do it! I was like, ‘Please!’ I skipped all the stages of grief and went straight to begging. I was like, ‘I can do this. I can be in Australia and Abu Dhabi at the same time.’ He wanted me to be part of the universe. We kept in touch. I just had this feeling that it wasn’t over.”

While filming “Furiosa,” Taylor-Joy kept asking her agents about “Dune,” but they told her that the production had begun without her. Then, Villeneuve called her. “He said, ‘I made a deal with the studio: If I was on budget and on time, I could do this.’…I told my husband and my parents, “and I took my mum. I asked Denis to tell the cast beforehand,” she says. “I said, ‘I can’t just show up. Please don’t do that to me.’”

[Photo Credit: Jonny Marlow for Variety Magazine]

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