The atmosphere that was generated between Charlize Theron (Benoni, South Africa, 48 years old) and Tom Hardy (London, United Kingdom, 46 years old) during the filming of the 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road It was tense. Very tense. For his co-star Nicholas Hoult, “it was like you were going on summer vacation and the adults wouldn’t stop arguing in the front of the car,” as he described it in the book. Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max, published in 2022. Theron herself agrees with Kyle Buchanan in the same book: “He’s right, we were like two parents in the front of the car. We were either fighting or ignoring each other, I don’t know which is worse, and they had to deal with it in the back. It was horrible! We shouldn’t have done that; we should have been better. I recognize it”. Now that the prequel to the film, Furiosa: from the Mad Max saga, is preparing for its world premiere this Wednesday at the Cannes Festival and its arrival in theaters at the end of May, it is the director of both films, George Miller, who has reflected on that notorious dispute. “They were two very different artists,” he says. in an interview with The Telegraph, in which he also assures that he spoke with the new protagonists of the saga so as not to repeat the past.
The film was a success. It received 10 Oscar nominations in 2016 and won six of the statuettes (for best production design, best sound, best sound editing, best makeup, best costume design and best editing). It was also a commercial triumph, with a collection of 375 million dollars (more than 347 million euros) worldwide. But the road to get there was not easy, in part because of the strained relationship between its two main protagonists. “Tom has a trauma, but also a brilliance, that accompanies him, and whatever was happening to him at that moment he had to be forced out of his van,” the Australian director, 79, now recalls about Tom Hardy , who played Max. “On the other hand, Charlize was extremely disciplined, a trained dancer, which was evident in the precision of her performance, and she was always the first on set,” explains Charlize Theron, who played Furiosa.
The new prequel will also feature Hardy’s performance, but not Theron’s. Even so, the filmmaker says in the British media that he is “optimistic” and that at the time he took the behavior of the two actors “as a reflection of their characters, where they had to learn to cooperate to guarantee mutual survival.” The film is set in a future, post-apocalyptic desert Earth where gasoline and water are scarce commodities. Against this backdrop, ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) ends up joining forces with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Teron) and Nux (Nicholas Hoult) against the wasteland leader and his army, leading to a long road battle. But despite his optimism in the past, the director does now recognize that “there is no excuse” for the obvious quarrels between the protagonists. “I think there is a tendency in this business to use big performances as an excuse for other disruptions that could be avoided,” he says.
Camera operator Mark Goellnicht speaks in the book of an “explosive” meeting that definitively ignited the tension between both interpreters. “I remember that day vividly. The call on set was at eight. Charlize arrived right at eight, she sat in the war truck knowing that Tom was never going to be there at eight, even though she had made a special request for her to arrive on time. He was known for never being on time in the morning. If the call time was in the morning, forget it, he wasn’t going to show up,” she explains. First assistant cameraman Ricky Schamburg seconds this: “Whether it was some kind of power play or not, I don’t know, but it felt deliberately provocative. If you ask me, he knew that he was really bothering Charlize, because she is professional and she shows up very early.” Goellnicht continues to remember that hours passed and Hardy still did not appear, while Theron did not leave the truck even to go to the bathroom. The actor finally made an appearance three hours later. “Tom appears and walks casually through the desert. She jumps off the platform and starts cursing at him: ‘Fine that damn bastard $100,000 for every minute he delayed this group’ and ‘How disrespectful you are!’ She was right. He approached her and said, ‘What did you tell me?'” the camera operator remembers. That was the turning point for the actress, who after that incident she requested protection. Since then, she was assigned a producer (Denise di Novi) to be with her at all times and make sure there were no more conflicts.
In the nine years since the film’s release, both Theron and Hardy have taken responsibility for the film’s disputes. Mad Max: Fury Road, citing the grueling production schedule and general lack of mutual trust as the main triggers for that royal fury. “In retrospect, I was lost in many ways. The pressure on both of them was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner. That’s something you can’t fake. “I’d like to think that now, that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to the occasion,” Hardy acknowledges in the 2022 book. “I don’t want to make excuses for bad behavior, but it was a difficult shoot. Now, I have a very clear perspective of what happened. I don’t think I had that clarity when we were making the movie. “I was in survival mode, I was very scared,” she declares in another passage. “Because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, ‘Fuck, this scares you and it scares me too.’ Let’s be kind to each other.’ We were functioning in a strange way, like our characters: it was all about survival,” she adds.
In the new film, which opens in Spanish cinemas on May 24, the protagonists are Anya Taylor-Joy (Florida, United States, 28 years old), who although she is the main character only has 30 sentences in the 150 minutes of film, and Chris Hemsworth (Melbourne, Australia, 40 years old). According to account in The Telegraph, Miller brought them together to talk to them before the blockbuster began and told them: “You have to be obsessive about safety: physical safety, as filming progresses and fatigue sets in, but also psychological safety. “It’s not like the old days.”
