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"I was still acting while I started working as an apprentice jeweller. Acting just started to slow down and I got more interested in having a secure job and getting a trade."

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The Road Warrior (1981) is one of those movies that commands a really, really loyal fan-following. Emil Minty, who played "The Feral Kid," Max's young sidekick with a razor-edged boomerang, may just be a one-time actor to the average movie-goer, but to diehard Mad Max fans, he's a superstar. The Feral Kid showed viewers a side of the wasteland we weren't expecting, a young boy who was able to survive on wits and toughness alone. If you haven't heard of Emil Minty since that movie came out, it's simply because he didn't really take much interest in making a career of acting.

Feral Kid the Jeweller

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Emil Minty had a brief acting career before The Road Warrior, starring in a few commercials before beating out hundreds of other kids in auditions forThe Road Warrior. Filming was kept secret. At the time, Mad Max was like the Australian Star Wars. If word got out that they were acutally auditioning for a sequel, Minty would have had to audition against thousands of other kids.

The Road Warrior would be the biggest role of his career. While filming the movie, director George Miller asked him to come up with his own backstory for the character. Emil Minty and his parents came up with the idea that the Feral Kid was left to fend for himself after his father, a pilot, crashed in the desert and his mother disappeared after going to find him.

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Into adolescence, the whole acting thing just didn't hold Emil Minty's interest for very long. Of course, it's hard to blame him when your first big movie is The Road Warrior. It's difficult to imagine any movie project being more fun that that one, where Minty got to climb around on top of moving trucks and hurl razor-sharp boomerangs at wasteland barbarians. He featured in a few episodes of A Country Practice (1990) some years later, but after starring in a Mad Max film, Minty was essentially done with film. 

So what did Minty wind up doing once he lost interest in acting? Well, jewellery, setting stones and designing rings.

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Emil Minty began his career as an apprentice, getting into the business through a friend of the family. He learned the ropes and worked his way up in the trade and today he manages a jewelry shop in Sydney.

He might not be a rich and famous movie star, but we can all agree he hasn't done bad for himself, choosing the stable life of a tradesman over the big ups and downs and general uncertainty of a career in show-business.

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A Return To Film?

If you're thinking Emil Minty might return for the next Mad Max movie, don't get your hopes up. He's pretty much finished with acting, and it's unlikely he'll feature in even a cameo in the new film, given that director George Miller isn't too eager to bring any characters back for subsequent films except for series protagonist Mad Max Rockatansky. In fact, when the original villain of the series, Hugh Keays-Byrne, was brought back for the fourth film, he was playing an entirely new character, Immortan Joe.

That's not to say that he does not look back fondly on his legacy among fans of the series. He still has the razor boomerang he used in The Road Warrior, grants interviews to fans and makes the occasional convention appearance. But it's clear that his interests now are in running his jewelry shop in Sydney and taking care of his family. The Feral Kid was one of the strangest characters ever seen on film, but Emil Minty has grown up to live a very normal life.

"Life these days for me I guess is just normal like everyone else, always busy working and doing things with the family."