The Doof Warrior is Mad Max: Fury Road’s coolest character

Characters like the Doof Warrior don’t come along often. The unofficial mascot of Immortan Joe’s army, and a symbol of the bombast of Mad Max: Fury Road, the masked rocker with the flame-spitting guitar became an instant hit on the internet and received an immediate induction into the movie icon hall of fame.

The Doof Warrior is Mad Max: Fury Road in miniature. Both are combinations of seemingly disparate pieces and random parts, clearly grafted onto one another, but somehow still seamlessly organized to make something perfect and unique. The Doof Warrior is just one of Fury Road’s many miracles, but the story of his creation is also the perfect way to understand how the film reached the legendary status it has today. After all, why wouldn’t the coolest movie of the century so far also have the coolest character in it?

The origins of the Doof Warrior

Like the rest of Mad Max: Fury Road, Coma, the Doof Warrior, seems to have come about from the perfect intersection of a wildly ambitious, visionary filmmaker and technically excellent craftspeople.

The idea, as far as anyone seems to remember it, was all director George Miller’s. In Kyle Buchanan’s book about the making of the film, Blood, Sweat, & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller explained that the character is there to “distill the nature of Fury Road: Kind of wacky but rooted in some sort of reality. He was the equivalent of the drummer or the bugler, with his electric guitar.” Production designer Colin Gibson put it even more succinctly in an interview with MTV News shortly after the movie’s release, saying “Uncle George, being George Miller, imagined the biggest little drummer boy in the world.”

Image: Warner Bros/Everett Collection

With that idea in mind, Gibson said that his task, as he saw it, was to “build the largest, last Marshall stack at the end of the universe.” And that meant having the apocalypse’s coolest guitar to drive those amps.

For that, Gibson turned to salvage artist Michael Ulman, who did many of the props and vehicles for Fury Road. Ulman put together an incredible, sculptural guitar centered around a porcelain bedpan with a French horn at the center, and Gibson put a real working guitar somewhere in the center of it because, as he put it, “George — unfortunately — doesn’t like things that don’t work.” Thus the Doof Warrior’s incredible ax was born, a feat of engineering and art that could really play music and really shoot flames as it was driven through the desert.

“It is the shittest guitar I’ve ever had the misfortune to have hanging in front of me,” said iOTA, the guitarist and performer who played Coma, in Buchanan’s book. But even if the guitar wasn’t ideal to play, that didn’t seem to lessen iOTA’s enthusiasm for the role.

The Doof Warrior was one of the many characters that Miller created a fully fleshed-out backstory for. According to iOTA in an interview with Movie Web, Miller said that Immortan Joe found Coma in a cave and had him schooled in music in order to lead his army into battle. Displaying a kind of dark creativity commensurate with the role, iOTA did Miller one better by suggesting that Coma was found in the cave clutching his mother’s decapitated head, and that Coma took her face off and wears it as his battle mask in her honor.

When the Doof Warrior took over the internet

The Doof Warrior took the internet by storm the instant he arrived on the scene. As Cory Watson, the director of Fury Road’s behind-the-scenes documentary, told Buchanan, “You can’t even count the number of articles on the Doof Warrior that came out in the year or two after the film was released.” Sure, he quickly popped up in memes and gifs on Twitter and as a prime target for fanart, but the way websites wrote about him was an almost perfect mirror of the film’s success.

While its cultural legacy may be massive now, Fury Road started off small at the box office, with just a $45 million opening weekend. As more people saw the movie and told everyone they could about how incredible it was, the movie became the fabled “word of mouth success,” eventually earning more than $150 million at the domestic box office and nearly $400 million worldwide.

Similarly, enthusiasm for the Doof Warrior started small, with critics and writers who saw the movie early writing about how cool the “guitar guy” was, and explainers popping up about who exactly the character was. But as more and more people saw Fury Road and started clamoring to learn more about it, internet entertainment outlets started focusing their coverage even more and writing more and more stories.

Eventually, most of the stories started calling him by his rightful title, the Doof Warrior, instead of referring to him as Fury Road’s “guitar guy,” and the crew were happy to give reporters a peek behind the curtain. There were interviews with Gibson and Ulman, and even iOTA himself. Just like the movie, what started as an unbelievable curiosity suddenly bloomed into a cultural fascination that persists to this day: A cult hit that broke into the mainstream to become an absolute classic.

Image: Warner Bros.

The Doof Warrior still embodies Fury Road’s spirit

To give you an idea of how close Fury Road came to being a totally different movie, Miller told Buchanan in Blood, Sweat, & Chrome that the studio tried to cut the Doof Warrior several times. Fury Road had several different test screenings, and at most of them the Doof Warrior only had temporary sound, so he was playing the same guitar riff every time, annoying audiences. Miller had plenty of experience keeping Fury Road alive despite studio attempts to shut the production down, and the Doof Warrior was no different — the biggest little drummer boy stayed in.

Miller knew exactly what he was doing with Coma: “What I knew and no one else knew is that his music was going to evolve, and eventually that would become part of the full orchestration of the story. Of course, by the time the film was finished, he became probably one of the most popular characters.”

And that’s still true to this day. The Doof Warrior is an instantly recognizable symbol of Fury Road. A character too cool to be in any other movie, but also one of Miller and the crew’s dozens of world-building masterstrokes that help propel Mad Max: Fury Road from a great movie to a true one-of-a-kind classic.