Mad Max: Fury Road – Five Wives

Almost derailed by war, flowers and penguins, Mad Max: Fury Road, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in May 2025, had a journey to screen almost as tortured as the hellish road trip at its core. Its director George Miller came up with the idea for the film in 1987, but the events of 9/11 and the Iraq War delayed the shoot, as did unexpected rains in Broken Hill, which covered its stark deserts with wildflowers. Miller’s commitment to the animated penguin movie Happy Feet (2006) was a further check to production. But in 2015 Fury Road, the fourth film of the Mad Max universe, roared onto screens.

This ‘Five Wives’ featurette explores one of the most interesting angles of Fury Road: its anti-patriarchal theme. Miller has Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron), a female warrior with a prosthetic arm, replace Max (Tom Hardy) as the central character of the film, redrawing the parameters of what it means to be an ‘action hero’. She takes on the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) by escaping with his wives, and in the featurette the five actors playing them (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton) talk about the developing relationship between Furiosa and their characters. Their rage-filled cry, ‘We are not things’ – which the women leave emblazoned on the wall of their quarters, like a feminist manifesto – is reflected in the cut of this promotion, which foregrounds the women’s growing agency, ingenuity and camaraderie as they work together to outwit Joe and his allies.

Fury Road recasts the Wild West trope of its Mad Max predecessors, which pit a solitary man against a pack of enemies, as a narrative of female growth and solidarity, without losing the delirious, explosive thrill of its action scenes.