Anya Taylor-Joy spent three months pushing for her character to scream on-screen while shooting Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

The Queen’s Gambit star has only 30 lines of dialogue as a young Imperator Furiosa in the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel, meaning she spent “months” on set without speaking a single line.

She explained to The New York Times that director George Miller wanted Furiosa to be an emotionless silent character who expressed herself through her eyes, but she felt Furiosa needed a moment of “female rage”.

“I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” she said. “We’re animals, and there’s a point where somebody just snaps. There’s one scream in that movie, and I am not joking when I tell you that I fought for that scream for three months.”

She added, “With George, it’s a long game. You plant the seed day one, you leave it for a bit, then you check on it.”

Despite their different ideas about the character, Taylor-Joy wanted to make sure the Australian filmmaker always felt respected.

“I wanted to make sure that I was never insolent in any way, that it was always a conversation,” she insisted. “At the end of the day, this is his vision. I can present everything that I have, but his word goes.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the 28-year-old revealed the shoot was a solitary experience and she’d “never been more alone than making that movie”.

“I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard,” she continued, before declining to detail specifics. “Next question, sorry… Talk to me in 20 years.”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will be released in cinemas on 24 May.

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