George Miller has created a masterpiece with the late sequel to his sci-fi series Mad Max. Mad Max: Fury Road, which you can stream* on Amazon Prime subscription now, is an adrenaline rush made into a movie like one long action sequence works. What strikes you the most when you look at it is how hard it must have been to shoot the film. In fact, some of the production on the set has escalated.
Mad Max: Fury Road stars hated each other on set
George Miller wanted Fury Road to be as handmade as possible, for which the director is responsible tough shooting conditions and real life stunts with the film crew in the desert of Namibia. At some point, the mood within the team was very relaxed, particularly due to the climate.
For the details of the Fury Road shoot, New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan has published the behind-the-scenes book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road*. In it, a crew member of the sci-fi blockbuster describes the atmosphere between stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron as follows:
Damn it, it was so obvious that these two people hated each other. They didn’t want to touch, they didn’t want to look at each other, they didn’t want to turn to each other when the camera wasn’t rolling.
Hardy in particular is said to have repeatedly lost his composure on the set. This allegedly even led to threatening behavior towards the Furiosa actress. The book also details an incident in which the actor showed up far too late on set while Theron three hours of makeup done and waiting impatiently on the set had to spend:
Tom shows up and walks leisurely through the desert. She [Theron] jumps off the truck and curses his heart out in his direction. She says, ‘Bill that fucking asshole hundred thousand dollars for every minute he delays the crew’ and ‘How disrespectful you are!’.
At some point, the actress is said to have felt so threatened by Hardy that she was given a person to protect her. In the end, the more than strained relationship between the stars on the Fury Road set also led to the gruff dynamic between Max Rockatansky and Furiosa in George Miller’s result.
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