Anya Taylor-Joy alluded to challenges during the nearly seven months she spent filming her newest movie, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Sunday, the Queen’s Gambit star told the outlet that when production wrapped in 2022, she “knew I was going to need the two years that it took for the movie to come out to deal with it”.
“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” she said, with the New York Times noting that the actor was “choosing her words carefully”.
“I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard,” she said.
Anya also skipped a question about the difficulties she experienced on set, instead telling the Times after an extended silence, “next question, sorry” and uttering six unsettling words instead.
“Talk to me in 20 years,” Anya added. “Talk to me in 20 years.”
While it’s unclear what specific roadblocks she faced, later in the interview Anya gushed over her director, George Miller, who created the Mad Max franchise.
“I do want to 100 percent preface this by saying I love George and if you’re going to do something like this, you want to be in the hands of someone like George Miller,” she explained.
But there’s clearly something bothering the Last Night in Soho actor, as she said in a separate interview with Variety that she has trouble viewing the film, and hasn’t watched the final cut.
“Within the first three minutes, I’m crying,” she told the outlet last week. “And afterward, I cannot speak. I found it very traumatising to watch.”
Charlize Theron, who originated the character of Furiosa in George Miller’s 2015 addition to the Mad Max series, Fury Road, has also spoken out about some of the stress she experienced on set during filming.
“I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach,” Charlize told the same outlet in 2020.
“There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.”