You might be shocked at how little Anya Taylor-Joy speaks in Furiosa

Anya Taylor-Joy is the star of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, but she doesn't talk all that much in it.

I wouldn't say Mad Max is known for its dialogue, other than that much memed on line from Fury Road. But, you still might be surprised to hear how much, or how little, Taylor-Joy actually talks in the upcoming Furiosa. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, director George Miller shared that the film's lead only has about 30 lines of dialogue across its two-and-a-half hour long runtime, which covers around 15 years of Furiosa's life. Miller explained that the problem he finds with dialogue is that it slows things down, and that films are something best enjoyed at high speed. Given the whole souped-up vehicles racing across a desert wasteland thing, I would say that that line of thinking tracks with Miller.

Just because there wasn't much dialogue, it doesn't mean it was an easy experience for Taylor-Joy. In fact, it sounds like quite the opposite, as in an interview with The New York Times, the actor said she would go "months" on set without speaking a single line. "I've never been more alone than making that movie," she continued. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard." When asked to go into more detail on that last point, Taylor-Joy responded, "Next question, sorry. Talk to me in 20 years. Talk to me in 20 years."

At the very least, it doesn't sound like Miller was completely responsible for this feeling, though they did have some disagreements over Furiosa's presentation of female rage. "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. But he had a very, very strict idea of what Furiosa's war face looked like, and that only allowed me my eyes for a large portion of the movie. It was very much 'mouth closed, no emotion, speak with your eyes.' That’s it, that’s all you have."

"I am a really strong advocate of female rage," she continued. "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."

Furiosa is due out in cinemas next week, May 24.