Many of the characters that appear in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga we’ve met before: Furiosa, of course. Immortal Joe. The War Boys. But one of the new additions, Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus, is not only mad and exciting, he changed throughout the filmmaking process.
io9 spoke to Hemsworth recently about the film and, since the entire script for Furiosa is backstory for the title character, we asked what backstory George Miller provided him for Dementus. It turns out, not as much as you’d think. “He had a lot of ideas, but the beauty of filmmaking is how you start off with one expectation and you end up in a very different place,” Hemsworth said. “I think for both of us, the character evolved in a really satisfying way.”
One example the Thor star gave was the fact Dementus carries around a small teddy bear with him. At first, it was just part of the weird, creepy, Wasteland costumes created for the series but then it became more. “The teddy bear, for instance, didn’t necessarily hold much value in the script but then became sort of a totem and it became a representation of his past and something that he passed on,” Hemsworth said.
“The organic nature and growth of characters, it doesn’t always happen like that,” he continued. “But I found it satisfying because of the collaboration with Anya [Taylor-Joy] and I. Even from rehearsal, she would say things and do things that would make me think differently about how my performance was going to go. And then the culmination of the final scene in the movie was quite different than it was on the page due to the discussions we were having back and forth. And so, I mean, that’s the joy of it. You want to be surprised each time and we were.”
We think you’ll also be surprised when you see where Dementus came from, what he wants, and especially where he ends up in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is now in theaters.
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