While The Road Warrior wouldn’t have worked without the Feral Kid, the Max Max franchise star didn’t remain an actor for long after the movie’s release. While some child stars stick with acting well into adulthood, a lot of young performers end up leaving the industry after their early fame subsides. In the case of Emil Minty, a pivotal role in the Mad Max franchise as the Feral Kid was one of the actor’s only parts before he moved on from show business.
The Feral Kid was a mute scavenger who befriended Max and proved to be a brave companion to the title character, with Max saving him from death in the climactic melee. The dénouement of The Road Warrior reveals that his grown-up self was the movie’s narrator, making Fury Road the only Mad Max movie that the character himself narrates. However, despite playing such an important part in sci-fi cinema history, the Feral Kid wasn’t interested in sticking with acting for long after his most famous role.
Emil Minty was nine when he won the role of the Feral Kid, and the actor did almost all of his own stunts while shooting the sequel. The job was Minty’s first major role, as the young actor had only booked one commercial before The Road Warrior. In the years that followed, Minty acted in a small handful of Australian television and movie productions before he retired from the business at the age of 18. After ending his acting career, Minty went on to own and operate a jewelers store in Sydney. While later movies brought back original stars like Mad Max villain Toecutter actor Hugh Keays Byrne, Minty’s choice to leave the industry meant that he hasn’t been seen again in any of the subsequent sequels.
Where Mad Max 2’s Emil Minty Is Now
Emil Minty continued to work as an actor throughout the 80s, appearing in Australian movies like Fluteman and The Winds of Jarrah. He also appeared on the television shows A Country Practice and The Flying Doctors around the same time, along with The Haunted School. Minty retired from acting after school and became a jeweler, and the father of two now lives and works in Sydney. Bizarrely, David Foster Wallace’s acclaimed 1996 novel Infinite Jest named a minor character after the child star.
However, an unlikely name-drop in a landmark piece of American comic fiction wasn’t Minty’s last contribution to pop culture. One of the many pieces of post-apocalyptic media influenced by the Mad Max movies was the Wasteland video game series and, in 2020, Wasteland 3 featured a cameo voice performance from Minty. The actor played the radio announcer heard throughout Wasteland 3 in a fun meta nod to his most famous role as the narrator of Mad Max’s second cinematic adventure. Apparently, Minty enjoyed the project, although it was evidently not enough to drag the iconic Feral Kid from The Road Warrior back to the industry that gave him his first job as the star of the acclaimed Mad Max sequel.