Sure, the character – called Coma-Doof Warrior – was a visual spectacle, an apocalyptic Eddie Van Halen complete with flames shooting out of his musical instrument – but Miller laid out for me an entire backstory for the character that viewers never saw.
“I would like to think he’s still alive, somehow,” Miller said as I expressed hope that the character returns for the next film even though his condition at film’s end was uncertain. “In fact, we’ve got a whole backstory on how he came to be in that position. I often think about it. The approach to the film was, you have to be able to explain everything. Not only all the characters, but every object, how it all found its way into this world and how it survived. In his case, he was blind from birth. When things started going a bit crazy, he and his mother were left in a mining town. The only way they could survive was to go into a place where there was a competitive advantage to being blind. And that was to go deep down into a mine shaft where they were able to survive. He took what was most precious to him, a musical instrument, probably a guitar.”
As for how he wound up strapped to one of Immortan Joe’s death vehicles, Miller said: “As they were careening through the wasteland, someone heard this music echoing out of that mine shaft, went down there and luckily they saw him as an asset. I think they killed his mother because she wasn’t of any use. They took him and he eventually ended up as the equivalent of the drummer, the fife player or the bagpiper, in Immortan Joe’s army.”
Miller said each and every character, from Theron’s one-armed Furiosa to Nicholas Hoult’s Nux, had an equally deep backstory.