Sometimes opposites really don’t attract. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, director George Miller opened up about the well-documented feud between Mad Max: Fury Road stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, admitting that “there’s no excuse for it” and that it was a “disruption.”
“They were just two very different performers,” Miller told The Telegraph. “Tom has a damage to him but also a brilliance that comes with it, and whatever was going on with him at the time, he had to be coaxed out of his trailer. Whereas Charlize was incredibly disciplined—a dancer by training, which told in the precision of her performance—and always the first one on set.”
According to Miller, the relationship between Theron and Hardy was frosty in part because it reflected the relationship between their respective characters, Furiosa and Max Rockatansky. “I’m an optimist, so I saw their behavior as mirroring their characters, where they had to learn to cooperate in order to ensure mutual survival,” said Miller.
Still, Miller readily admits that the stars’ tension was a detriment to production and wasn’t necessary for the film to achieve greatness. “There’s no excuse for it,” he told The Telegraph. “I think there’s a tendency in this business to use great performances as an excuse for other disruption that could be avoided.”
In a chapter from his book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, excerpted in Vanity Fair, New York Times writer Kyle Buchanan detailed Theron and Hardy’s bad blood via interviews with the cast and crew. Tension arose from their differing approaches to the work, with the freewheeling Hardy often showing up to set late and the disciplined Theron showing up on time—leading to a veteran female producer, Denise Di Novi, being brought in to mediate. Theron said she often felt “naked and alone” on set, and said that in hindsight it would have been nice to have a female producer on set from the beginning of the process.
“That’s where we could have done better, if George trusted that nobody was going to come and fuck with his vision but was just going to come and help mediate situations,” said Theron. “I think he didn’t want any interference, and there were several weeks on that movie where I wouldn’t know what was going to come my way, and that’s not necessarily a nice thing to feel when you’re on your job. It was a little bit like walking on thin ice.”
Owning up to his part of the drama, Hardy told Buchanan that he was “in over my head in many ways” on the set of Fury Road. “The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times,” he said. “What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.”
Miller returns to the world of Mad Max with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which stars Chris Hemsworth as Dr. Dementus and sees Anya Taylor-Joy starring as a younger version of Theron’s Furiosa. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Theron revealed that Taylor-Joy did not contact her before taking the role. “It’s always tricky,” Theron said. “Who wants to pick up the phone and say, like, ‘Hey, we’re going to go do this without you.’ No one wants to do that,” she said. But Theron maintained to THR that there’s no bad blood to be found between her and Taylor-Joy, or between her and Miller. “So I totally get that. And I love George. I know I’ll talk to him again. I think it was just too hard.”
And this time, Miller is doing things a bit differently. The filmmaker told The Telegraph he met with Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy before production. “You have to be obsessive about safety—physical safety, as the shoot goes on and fatigue sets in, but also psychological safety,” he said. “It’s not like the wild old days.”
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