‘The philosophy is the same’: Costume designer Jenny Beavan on ‘Furiosa’ and her storied career

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“I don’t think the philosophy has changed,” says Jenny Beavan, the British costume designer who is set to receive the Career Achievement Award at the 2025 Costume Designers Guild Awards for nearly five decades of costume direction, including her work in George Miller’s latest film Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

“I think what has eased up is being older and more experienced, [which] means you know how to tackle the problems better,” she continues. “You don’t know how to solve them always, but you certainly know how to tackle them. You know not to be scared of saying, ‘It’s my fault, I’m really sorry, or I really don’t know what to do with this. Do you have any ideas?’ I mean, just being really much more honest and not having to worry about hoping everybody thinks you can do everything. You can’t.” 

The downside, however, is that “one’s joints aren’t quite as flexible as they used to be, so running up and down ladders isn’t quite as much fun, and I have a terrible shoulder from years of lifting heavy costumes.”

Beavan is up for a surgery in February. “It’s an operation which apparently is very successful and a game changer so I can’t wait,” she says fondly, before returning to the topic. “Anyway, no, I think the philosophy is the same: it’s telling stories with clothes to support the actor.”

We are sharing a lovely conversation over Zoom. Her gray curls accentuate her presence, especially against the neat array of books, alongside a few awards, occupying her part of the screen. She’s in her office in her London residence, a sanctuary to her for more than 30 years now. Though it’s still a bit too early for her, she’s more than willing to entertain questions or, at times, recount some wonderful encounters.

BEAVAN. Jenny Beavan working at her London home. Photo courtesy of Jenny Beavan

Beavan was born to musician parents: her father played the cello, her mother the viola. Drawn to theater at age 10, she knew she wanted to be part of it, but dressing actors wasn’t what she expected to do. Instead, she became fascinated with set designs, eventually becoming a student of stage designer Ralph Koltai at the Central School of Art and Design in the ‘60s.

“He always said, ‘darling, don’t worry about the costume, you always get someone else to do them.’ And I loved making the world, I loved making big sculptural sets, but I mean it’s all the same, it’s storytelling.”

Among her formative experiences was at age 21, when she’d gone to the Welsh Theatre Company, a tiny studio theatre at the time run by the same person behind the Welsh National Opera. Beavan got hired to work on Carmen — a popular opera by French composer Georges Bizet — at Covent Garden, after Koltai, who was supposed to work on the designs, dropped the project due to artistic differences with the show’s conductor.

Beavan didn’t know the opera very well, save for the Toreador Song, a known aria from Carmen. The show’s director gave her an LP and she worked on the opera’s first act, never realizing that it would be her ticket to set designing. (She also boarded a plane to Frankfurt to meet the Hungarian-British conductor Sir Georg Solti.) “That is something very, very big in my memory of theater opera. And literally our first night was in June, I think, and I turned 22 in August,” she recalls.

From opera, Beavan branched out to ballets and stage plays. Her foray into motion pictures was mere happenstance. A friend she met at a dance class introduced her to Merchant Ivory Productions, founded by producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory. “They simply assumed I was a costume designer. So I just became a costume designer,” she says. “And I always liked doing the costumes for my sets because I liked to fit the characters into the places I created.” 

Beavan continues, “I suppose the fun of costume is that you work with actors, with real people and the fun of sets is a chest of drawers and a piece of furniture can’t answer back or give opinions so you know it’s almost easier in one way. But I actually love the interaction with actors and finding the characters so I suppose it’s the same difference.”

FURIOSA. The Mad Max movie has been notable for its striking costumes

Through Merchant Ivory, Beavan got her first Academy Award for the 1985 film adaptation of A Room with a View, then proceeded to work on more period films that also earned Oscar nominations, including Maurice, The Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility, and The King’s Speech. When she took on George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, among the best action movies of the previous decade, she won her second Oscar, then her third for the American dark comedy Cruella. She also has four BAFTAs under her belt.

Beavan’s latest work in Furiosa, a prequel to the post-apocalyptic terrain of Fury Road, has already earned six nominations, such as from the Costume Designers Guild and Astra Film and Creative Arts Awards and a win from the Chicago Film Critics Association. The film finds her in a more comfortable position. “I was very happy to be asked back. I mean, most of the crew were the same. We’re just all 10 years older. He’s incredibly loyal, George, to his crews.” 

The fifth installment in the Mad Max franchise, Furiosa tracks the woeful and adrenaline-spiked odyssey of the titular character (Anya Taylor-Joy), after she was abducted by warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). “The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?” says Dementus to Furiosa in a striking scene in the film — a question that might as well be directed to Miller, but also to Beavan as someone tasked to make Miller’s torrent of characters visually real and purposeful.

“George is wonderful, the kindest man on earth, and I absolutely love him,” says Beavan. “But like all new directors, it’s a challenge to work out really what they’re thinking and what they want.”

“So I once asked George when the apocalypse happened and he said, ‘40 years ago last Wednesday.’ So in my mind it’s always 40 years ago last Wednesday. 40 years isn’t that long,” the costume director explains. “Fabrics, clothes, things last. So you probably have what you stand up in when it [happened], which we don’t know what it was — fires like in Los Angeles, nuclear explosion — who knows what actually happened. But obviously it razed the ground.”

Still from the film. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

This thinking became the anchor of every costume Beavan brought to life in the film. “You let your mind go free. But you know you’ll stay within those parameters. And yes, you can decorate stuff because they would. Just because it’s very practical doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful or interesting in some way and bones would still be around probably in the wasteland. So there’s an element of real practicality which I think makes it far more interesting than sort of the space age.”

The design process began in Prague in 2021, while a workshop set up in Sydney by costume supervisor Mel Dykes (who’d been in Fury Road) was ongoing. Later, Beavan and associate costume designer Lauren Reyhani would go back to England, where they put up a tiny workroom, alongside three costume makers and an artist. Working in Australia, where the film was shot, happened much later due to pandemic lockdowns.

“It was tricky in England then, but it was opening up and our army surplus around the corner was absolutely brilliant,” says Beavan. Her small crew worked with all sorts of old tents, old ground sheets, textures, clothes (“I had pockets in them, because they had no homes, they had to keep stuff on them”), and motorbike gear.

They also worked with canvases and calicoes and even experimented with natural dyes in Beavan’s back garden.

“I have a pretty different approach,” Beavan tells me. She prefers to dress up a stand because it’s three-dimensional, and makes moodboards from ideas pulled off the internet and sent by her crew via phone or email. By the end of the process, she’s got about 35,000 photographs to work with. “And I do moodboards from those, but real cut and paste,” she’s quick to clarify. “I don’t do it on the computer. I literally print them and make A3 image boards.”

Costume sketch for ‘Furiosa’ characters. Photo courtesy of Jenny Beavan

During the ideation period for Furiosa, Beavan had two artists. One is Cardiff-based creative designer Thom Botwood, who she met on the set of Cruella. “He doesn’t do costume drawings in sort of a Hollywood look where they do them on an iPad and they look immaculate… but rather cold and two-dimensional. Thom does sort of inspiration-ideas and we back the ideas backwards and forwards.”

The other is Italian artist Elena Pavinato, whom she had never met in person. “Her style is in the very old fashioned, fabulous drawings — [the likes of] Piero Tosi, Anna Anni, those wonderful Italian costume designers.” Beavan continues, “Elena did more once we’d put the costume on the stand and we’d given her a lot of reference. She would then make it into a drawing, which was beautiful and good to show George.”

It was a wonderful process of playing and trying out what works and what doesn’t. “But I can do without the drawing,” reveals Beavan. “It has to be three-dimensional because people are three-dimensional. And then of course the joy of getting the real actor [to] bring their body language and their sense to it. So then you really know where you’re going.”

But whose costume in Furiosa was the most demanding? “I think probably Dementus,” she says. She says there’s a lot of work to make his costume consistent, continuity-wise.

Next is Furiosa herself. “[It’s] because of what she does all the way through, but then she’s disguised a lot of the time. But [there’s also the challenge of] having to work out how she’d have gotten hold of those clothes.”

Chris Hemsworth plays Dementus in the film. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

These days, Beavan prefers to see theater than cinema, like shows of her go-to comedians Daniel Kitson or Joe Lycett, or Nicholas Hytner’s latest production, though, admittedly, she’s a fan of Conclave and last year’s The Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, and The Holdovers.

Beavan is now in her 70s and after almost 50 years in the industry, she says she’s still not done. “It’s terrifying, each film, but I love the challenge. I love working with people. I love the sociability of the job. You know, I’m not on my own in a studio painting or drawing or something.”

She might be a bit picky about her projects now, but still prefers to be part of a team. “And yeah, I am getting a lifetime achievement award, but I’m going to make it very clear that I have not yet achieved everything I wish to in my lifetime. Hopefully. I’m still here.”

For a career so storied, suffused with fabrics, prototypes and sand dunes, Beavan always honors how she got her start, especially all the learnings from James Ivory, whom she’s seen recently.

“He’s 9 to 6. He’s still sharp as a tack.” The director is one of the producers and subjects of Stephen Soucy’s documentary Merchant Ivory. “If you can, see it, it’s how I was brought up. And then you really understand me. He was extraordinary. And he, with his attitude to his crew, which was [to] hire the best people you can find, and let them get on with it. I, of course, love that approach and I think you end up doing your absolute best work.”

Beavan sees the director as her film god. “He once told me, ‘I didn’t bring you up to run around deserts with semi-naked men after you’d seen Fury Road.’ But, yeah, I think the world of Jim and always will. Again, the more I look at all his films, not just the ones we did, the more amazed I am by them. And his very quiet way of directing, where he’s absolutely telling you everything, but he doesn’t need to say it, if you know what I mean. It’s very subliminal, really. Yeah, he’s my hero.” – Rappler.com