The Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga script is full of “Holy shit!” moments. But when Tom Burke first read it, a single line shot straight up like a red flare in his head. “I remember exactly what it said in the script,” he recalls.
“It said, ‘The Mortifiers become the Mortiflyers.’” The 42-year-old actor, who plays War Rig driver Praetorian Jack in the postapocalyptic prequel, is describing an image that feels like it’s designed to break the no-talking-at-the-movies rule. During a race through the Australian wasteland, motorcycle-towed attackers sprout parachutes and go airborne.
The sight of marauders dive-bombing Jack’s convoy caused me to reflexively blurt out, “Wooooo!” I assume many viewers reacted the same way on opening weekend. It’s the kind of eye-singeing mayhem—at once utterly fantastical, viscerally realistic, and seemingly impossible—that only one director can pull off without completely relying on CGI: George Miller. His and Nick Lathouris’s screenplay lays out every fiery set piece in vivid detail.
“Sometimes action sequences are just this big, dense block of things, which is somehow never quite helpful with my brain,” Burke says. “There’s something about the spacing of the way they write these out that you really go, OK, yeah. So it was beautifully put, beautifully curated in what it was.
” What makes Miller’s brutally picturesque imagination unique is that it’s not confined to the page. Even his most wildly explosive fever.
