The new Mad Max prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga originated in materials that George Miller and his collaborators created in pre-production on Mad Max: Fury Road. To fully understand who their characters were, they wrote biographies of their lives prior to the events of the movie, including one for the ferocious Furiosa, played in Fury Road by Charlize Theron. After the success of Fury Road, Miller decided to turn that backstory into its own movie, which is how we got a Furiosa prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy.
But that wasn’t the only backstory Miller wrote; he also filled in what happened to Max himself prior to Fury Road. And now Miller tells Entertainment Weekly that he’d like to make that stuff into a movie too.
It turns out Max makes a very brief cameo in Furiosa because, in Miller’s words “we had to see that Mad Max was lurking around somewhere because we do know what happened.” And Miller added that “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.”
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Tom Hardy played Max in Fury Road, taking over the role from Mel Gibson, who portrayed Mad Max in Miller’s first three Mad Max features from the 1970s and ’80s. While their performances were extremely effective in the finished film, Hardy and Theron supposedly did not get along very well during the shooting of Fury Road,as detailed in Kyle Buchanan’s excellent oral history of the film, Blood, Sweat & Chrome, which was published in 2022.
So I am skeptical we might ever see a sequel to Fury Road featuring Max and Furiosa (or at least those actors playing Max and Furiosa). But if we got a Furiosa prequel I think it would only be right to also get a Max prequel as a companion piece. And if George Miller directed it, you know it would be incredible.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is scheduled to open in theaters on May 24.
