Emmy winner Yahya Abdul-Mateen II knew he had to be “honest” and true to himself as he stepped away from George Miller‘s Mad Max followup Furiosa.
In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused, the Wonder Man star noted how his years-long busy shooting schedule led him to prioritize rest over the action-thriller project.
Abdul-Mateen II noted he graduated from Yale School of Drama in 2015 and was already making frequent trips from New Haven, Conn. to New York City to film his breakout role in 2016’s The Get Down. After that, he went into filming early projects First Match and The Vanishing of Sidney Hall.
“And then from there, I go do Baywatch, and then from Baywatch, I’m doing Greatest Showman,” he recounted, “and then I’m in Australia, and then from Australia I go to Canada to go do Handmaid’s Tale, and then from there I go to Atlanta to go and do Watchmen. Then I go to L.A. for a bit, and then I go to Chicago. Then I look up and I’m in New York for a spell doing Trial of the Chicago 7, and then boom pandemic, and then I’m off to San Francisco and then Berlin [for Matrix]. From Berlin, I come back, I touch down a little bit and I forget what I do after that, but then I’m back in London doing Aquaman 2, and it’s 2021 by now, and I’m tired.”
Abdul-Mateen II added that he left out his filming stint in Brazil for Black Mirror.
“I won’t call them champagne problems, but these are gifts, these are blessings the entire way, but it did come with something else which was me just being very, very tired,” the Us actor said, “and the world was changing, the world was responding to me differently, just as — all of a sudden — I’m some type of commodity, and people were looking at me differently. I’m just adjusting to this new reality at the same time as the world is changing, and then whatever else it was I had going on in my own personal life, and still having to persevere and perform.”
So when director George Miller, whom he described as “on top of it,” set up dedicated phone calls and Zooms a year out from production, despite the actor’s appreciation of his creative vision, he felt he wouldn’t be able to make space to deliver.
“It wasn’t overwhelming. It was so cool; it was actually so cool because he loved it. And it was like the only thing that he cared about and he made the time in his life to do that, and he had his actors involved in the process a year ahead, just having creative and imaginative conversations, and I knew deep down inside that it was too much and that I needed to rest,” Abdul-Mateen II concluded. “I’m so glad that I handled that honestly, that I was honest about the way that I handled that because then I could separate myself from that with integrity and let another actor step in to do a fantastic job and bring everything that they had. And also, it allowed me to rest and rejuvenate and recalibrate and then wait, keep continuing to say no until the right thing showed up.”
Eventually, Tom Burke replaced the Candyman star in the prequel also starring Anya Taylor-Joy. At the time, Deadline reported the exit was due to a scheduling conflict, with sources saying it was related to a secret passion project Abdul-Mateen II had been developing for some time.
Outside of Wonder Man Season 2, Abdul-Mateen has a spate of upcoming projects, including Liminal, House of Games, The Adventures of Cliff Booth and By Any Means. He was also recently seen in Netflix’s newly released thriller series Man on Fire.
Watch the clip from the interview below:
