Warning: Spoilers for Furiosa to follow.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the story of one woman's revenge. Fittingly, then, all of the men in it are trash. Well, almost all of them.
Though Anya Taylor-Joy's eponymous wasteland warrior spends much of the film's runtime in the company of nowt but her mind — well, and Chris Hemsworth's jocular warlord, Dementus — she does come to have at least one friend/lover. That's the War Rig driver Praetorian Jack, played by Tom Burke, known to Letterboxd-loving film nerds for playing The Souvenir's posho fuckboi, Anthony. His costuming, and general vibe, calls back to the early Mad Max movies, not least The Road Warrior, clad in pitch-black leather armour, with dark smudges under his eyes, like he's smeared on petrol tank residue as war paint.
He's a gentle soul, not one for the wasteland, which isn't to say he's a weakling; he shoots plenty of bandits to bits, and teaches Furiosa a thing or two about handling big rigs. But crucially, Jack holds onto a capacity for empathy and understanding that is as rare in the post-apocalypse as clean water and the ability to spell “post-apocalypse.” He's hardly the character Burke imagined when George Miller dropped him a line. “I immediately start conjuring the person I'm gonna play, and I think I'm going to look hideous, I'm going to be covered in boils,” Burke tells GQ. “I had no idea that it was gonna be somebody quite heroic, and nice.”
Jack spends much of his screen time at the wheel of his War Rig, but it's nevertheless a very physical performance. Much of Burke's practical prep, then, was “to do with being as lithe as possible,” he says. “Getting in and out of the War Rig, and knowing exactly what height that was gonna be… being able to jump out of it and land safely 60, 70 times, however many takes we'd do.” He also underwent firearms training, such as tends to be the demand of actors on big-budget shooty-shooty action flicks, and spent many of his evenings in the gym with legendary Australian stunt performer Richard Norton, who reprises his role from Fury Road as The Prime Imperator.
One of the first scenes that Burke shot would be Praetorian Jack's last. Around three-quarters of the way through the movie, Jack and Furiosa are ambushed at Bullet Town by Dementus and his jolly gang of raiders. They manage to shoot their way through the horde and escape Bullet Town — not that they get far before Dementus and his cronies catch up with them. Beaten, tied up, and mercilessly taunted by the warlord's cultish flock, Furiosa is forced to watch as Jack is dragged around on a rope tied to the back of a motorbike. Initially jogging, he falls; we don't see any gore, but it's fair to presume that the sand deletes his face.
As Burke puts it mildly: “It's a very unromantic death.” Burke was surprised that Miller wanted to shoot the scene in one long take, noting that on average the frenetically paced Fury Road cuts every couple of seconds, which in part gives it the unique look of an action movie that has just smashed its face into a crushed up pile of Adderall. “He wanted the whole being dragged out of the car, Chris talking to us, getting tied up, [all shot in] one take,” Burke recalls. “They suddenly said before we started, George wants to do some longer bits on this. Which I love, I think it gives the whole film a whole other quality, something more lyrical.”
He shot almost all of it himself. “And I was like, ‘We’re doing this on my first day? Really? They want to get rid of me.' I had a little square there,” he says, gesturing to his midriff, “essentially to make sure that the costume didn't get too rubbed, or scratched, just over my solar plexus.” For the scenes that really would've fucked him up, the production subbed in a Tom Burke replica dummy that they could sand and scour as much as they pleased. “When it's the high shot, and I'm completely motionless, that's a mannequin or whatever. They digitally printed the mannequin, it's very accurately me. But when it's a dead body, it doesn't need to be me.”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is now in cinemas.
