Everything You Need to Know About Young(er) Furiosa in Furiosa

Photo: Warner Bros.

Many of the Furiosa reviews coming out of the Cannes Film Festival will rightly focus on Anya Taylor-Joy’s coal-fire performance, on the film’s labyrinthine action sequences, on its relentless sense of bleak hopelessness, on Chris Hemsworth’s insane fake nose. But I walked away from George Miller’s latest Cannes premiere tonight still thinking about Alyla Browne. Browne plays the extra-young Furiosa to Taylor-Joy’s normal-young Furiosa, and the first hour or so of the two-and-a-half-hour film is entirely hers.

The film begins (warning: light Furiosa spoilers to follow) with Browne’s Furiosa plucking a ripe stone fruit from the tip-top of a tree in her verdant matriarchal homeland, the Green Place, where plants still flourish and there’s plenty of water and zero men to fuck that all up. Browne’s preternaturally confident gaze — which looks uncannily, almost freakily like Taylor-Joy’s, elfin and sharp — conveys Furiosa’s feistiness precociousness and quicksilver dexterity. Even if we didn’t know how her whole thing turned out, we’d understand that this girl was special.

Within minutes, she’s been yanked onto the back of a bike by Dementus’s (Chris Hemsworth) malevolent motorcycle gang and dragged across the desert to be presented to him. Her mother (Charlee Fraser) follows in an enraged pursuit, risking her own life several times over to save her beloved daughter. As anyone who’s seen Fury Road knows, she fails. And though Dementus tells her to look away, Furiosa watches her mother being tortured to death by his cronies. As she stares, unblinking, her small, delicate face visibly transforms and hardens. Where she was previously brightly rebellious and determined, she becomes blank, coiled. She disappears entirely into herself. But her eyes — Browne’s whole performance, much like Taylor-Joy’s later, is all about the eyes — flicker with hot, calculated vengeance.

A few scenes later, Furiosa meets a young Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and is effectively bartered to become one of his future wives. Here, her eyes water but don’t spill over, her emotions only briefly visible as she describes to Joe how Dementus brutally murdered her mother. That night, when she’s kidnapped from her bed by Joe’s rotting deli turkey of a son, Rictus Erectus, she takes stock of her situation. She saws off her hair and fashions it into an ingenious temporary wig cap, smears oil on her forehead, and disguises herself as a War Boy. She escapes Rictus’s clutches, and her face morphs again into something entirely inscrutable. Browne’s Furiosa never speaks again.

During one of her last sequences in the film, Browne’s Furiosa scales down a steep rock face and performs a complex, life-endangering maneuver on one of Dementus’s vehicles, her small form swinging effortlessly across the screen, her gaze still completely opaque. It’s one of the most impressive, how-did-they-do-that moments in a movie full of them. The Cannes Gala screening audience seemed to agree — after the film ended, the festival’s camera trained on each actor for a minute or so, as is tradition; save for Miller himself, Browne’s reception was the loudest and most enthusiastic.

So who is this frighteningly competent Gen-Z-Alpha cusp envoy sent to steal all of the YA jobs in Hollywood? According to IMDb, she’s a 14-year-old Australian-Estonian animal lover and “roller skater” with a plastic-recycling magnate father. She’s been working in film and TV since age 6, previously playing Nicole Kidman’s daughter on Nine Perfect Strangers, as well as extra-young Tilda Swinton in Miller’s last film, Three Thousand Years of Longing. According to a recent interview in Variety, she was cast in Furiosa after she got bored and taught herself to do the splits on the set of Three Thousand and Miller remarked that she “remind[s] me of a young Furiosa.” Browne “actually love[s] things that are post-apocalyptic,” she says, but dreams of starring in a “horse film.” She will make a horse film herself, she explains, if one is not soon made available to her.