How The Northman Prepared Anya Taylor-Joy For Furiosa Mad Max Prequel
Anya Taylor-Joy's experiences filming The Northman prepared her for her next role in the Mad Max spinoff Furiosa. The Northman sees Taylor-Joy reuniting with The Witch writer-director Robert Eggers to tell the brutal and epic tale of Amleth, a Viking prince played by Alexander Skarsgård, on a quest to avenge the murder of his father. Taylor-Joy plays Olga of the Birch Forest, a love interest to Amleth, whose own quest for revenge mirrors his.
Eggers is known for his exacting attention to detail. In The Witch, everything is period-accurate, from the early modern English the characters speak, to the boning in the women's corsets, to the thatching on the cottage's roof. Eggers even flew a white pine tree to set to make the hemlock forest of Ontario look more like New England. The Northman is no different. Steeped in mysticism and folklore, it was filmed under extreme conditions in Ireland and Iceland, eschewing green screens for location filming. They contended with endless mud and ice, howling winds on the tops of freezing mountains, and enacting fight choreography on an active volcano. Taylor-Joy has previously gone on record about how giddy the grueling conditions made her.
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In a recent interview with Total Film (via GamesRadar), Taylor-Joy and Skarsgård talk about how it's a miracle any of them survived the shoot. At one point, Taylor-Joy's shoes froze into the mud, and Skarsgård spent four days naked on a volcano filming the same fight scene. But neither complained much during the process, even if the long days resulted in the completion of only a single shot because they believed so much in the story. The shoot also led to some reflection
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