Furiosa director George Miller reveals how Chris Hemsworth adapted character
Hemsworth plays the film's main antagonist Warlord Dementus.
Almost a decade after Imperator Furiosa was first introduced in Mad Max: Fury Road, the character's origin story is being told in a brand new self-titled prequel which arrives in UK cinemas on a wave of positive reviews this weekend.
Interestingly, the script for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was initially written way back before filming on the previous film had even begun – and writer/director George Miller explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com that the "essential core" of the film has remained the same since.
But he also revealed that various things were added to the existing story and credited the film's cast with bringing a lot of new ideas – singling out one particular way in which Chris Hemsworth provided deeper meaning to his character Dementus.
"In the early concept art done on Furiosa, Dementus had a teddy bear," Miller explained. "He looked nothing like the Dementus we see in this movie. But he had a teddy bear. And it was just there without any regard to what the story was.
"And then as we rewrote the script when we were preparing to do the feature film, we added a little bit more about the teddy bear and so on. And then Chris Hemsworth, when he read the screenplay, somehow had dug down deeper into it – much more than I had in many ways, particularly from the point of view of his character.
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"And he started to see meaning in that teddy bear. And he was able to, you know... he brought a lot to the character."
Miller also revealed that Hemsworth was responsible for finding a lot of humour in Dementus even though he is extremely villainous throughout the film.
"I think it's the thing that he recognised in reading the screenplay," he said. "If you look at these figures – warlords, or tyrannical figures throughout history, and even the equivalents today... Almost inevitably, they are kind of showmen, or tricksters. They create some sort of cult following about themselves.
"And part of that is the unpredictability that comes from humour or kind of a showmanship – and you can name any one of these characters, present or past right through the 20th century... and that was something that Chris recognised and it's something that we sustained through the movie."
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He added that there is an animalistic element to the unpredictability that can be found in these characters, comparing it to a memorable experience he had in the presence of a dangerous animal in the past.
"If you watch, let's say, a monkey, or a cat or a tiger or something... you're watching them, and you're connecting with them and they're beautiful things and you want to touch them. But also, there's a danger to them," Miller explained.
"And I've been in the presence of a tiger with an animal trainer once and I was just watching it, it was watching me. And I just had this urge to pet it. And the animal trainer said, 'No no no, not too close.' That's that sort of thing, I think with charismatic leaders – and I think Chris brought that for mine."
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th May 2024.
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