A cut scene from the Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ending, in which more is learned about Dementus’ fate, is seemingly revealed by star Anya Taylor-Joy. George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road prequel movie ends with Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa getting revenge on her mother’s killer, Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). The nature of this revenge is truly unexpected, however, as the wild Furiosa ending sees the titular heroine subduing Dementus, and taking him to The Citadel where she plants her mother’s peach pit inside him, using his living body to fertilize the resulting tree.

Furiosa’s vengeance demonstrates that hope can spring from a place of hate, but a moment cut from the movie’s ending would have taken things farther, showing Furiosa literally silencing Dementus by removing his tongue. Taylor-Joy revealed this deleted moment in an interview where she talked about the props she kept from Furiosa. Check out her remarks below (via BBC1, around 8:00 of the clip):

So I have my [prosthetic Furiosa] arm but, there’s one choice in the movie that I really wanted that didn’t make it in, but I wanted it so badly. It’s not in the movie, but the prop department gave it to me to take home and that is Chris [Hemsworth’s] tongue. I’ve got Chris’s prosthetic tongue in a box … She silenced him, you know.

Furiosa’s Revenge On Dementus Goes Deeper Than Silencing Him

Image via Warner Bros.

In a film filled with bizarre images, few hit harder than the sight of an aging, but still-living, Dementus sprawled on a cave floor, with a peach tree growing out of his midsection. Implausible as this sight may be, it provides a richly symbolic coda to Furiosa’s final battle with Dementus, in which the warlord calls upon Furiosa to abandon hope in favor of hate, and join him in his ongoing war to usurp Immortan Joe and rule the Wasteland.

Furiosa not only doesn’t let hate win, she turns Dementus’ body into a vessel for creating hope, as symbolized by the peaches of the tree grown from the pit her mother gave her before Dementus tortured and killed her. Taylor-Joy sounds like she would have preferred a more straight-forwardly brutal end to her character’s battle with Dementus, but Miller disagreed, excising the moment where Furiosa ends Dementus’ endless raving by removing his tongue.

Furiosa cutting out Dementus’ tongue might have been a satisfying moment in its own right, and a truly appropriate one, considering how many lines Hemsworth has in the movie, compared to Taylor-Joy’s relatively few snippets of dialog. Perhaps Taylor-Joy, annoyed by her lack of lines, wanted to silence Dementus for deeper personal reasons. It’s hard to argue with the way Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ends, however, as it sets the stage for the events of Fury Road, and Furiosa’s later attempt at gaining redemption.