Every Actor Tom Hardy Beat To Play Mad Max In Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road replaced Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy, but stars as diverse as Michael Fassbender, Armie Hammer, and even Eminem were in the running.
Although Tom Hardy made the lead role his own, the star had to beat out a long list of competitors for the part in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Fury Road was not an easy movie to make. Released three decades after 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Fury Road was a massive critical and commercial hit upon release, but the sequel’s success was hard-earned.
In the intervening years, the franchise came upon a major problem when original series star Mel Gibson aged out of the title role. Although franchise newcomer Tom Hardy and Gibson play the same Mad Max, the search for the character’s new face was not a quick or easy one, as proven by Kyle Buchanan’s “When Max Met Furiosa,” Vulture’s oral history of the movie’s casting process. Dozens of big-name (and in some cases, surprisingly little-known) actors were considered before Hardy won the part.
Among these names, some will come as no surprise to longtime fans of the Mad Max franchise. Director George Miller has never made a secret of his desire to cast the late Heath Ledger in the role, and an earlier article on potential Mad Max actors listed the likes of Jeremy Renner among others. However, even Mad Max super fans may be surprised to learn how close Michael Fassbender was to receiving the role, or the fact that Armie Hammer was considered. Meanwhile, the news that then-rising star Joel Kinnaman was in the running will come as a shock to some, although it is not as surprising as hearing that rapper/actor Eminem could have played the sci-fi icon as well.
At 53 years old, veteran screen star Eric Bana is perhaps the least surprising name among the potential Mad Max actors revealed by Buchanan’s long-read. After all, he is only 13 years younger than Max’s original actor Gibson, is a native Australian like Gibson and Miller, and has plenty of blockbuster experience. However, Mad Max’s age has always been a contentious issue among the fandom and, as such, few viewers were worried about Gibson’s replacement being close in age to the original actor. The fact that Bana’s biggest movies were released in the early to mid-'00s, however, may have been a bigger issue for the casting directors and was certainly a factor when it came to considering another Australian actor.
Although no longer a major household name, Australian screen star Sam Worthington was once a ubiquitous presence in cinemas across the world. The actor was inescapable in the late-00’s and was the public favorite for the role of Max around this time, although his involvement with director James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar 2 might have made his participation in the competing sci-fi franchise a difficult prospect. In any case, Worthington was only one of many actors tapped to replace Gibson during the long process of making Fury Road, with him, Ledger, and Bana being the only Australians in the running.
An emerging name around the time that Fury Road went into pre-production in the early ‘10s, Michael Fassbender was arguably the actor most similar to eventual Mad Max replacement Tom Hardy. Like Hardy, he had been a critical favorite for around a decade by 2010, building an impressive repertoire of indie hits while also racking up supporting roles in more conventional, mainstream fare to prove his commercial viability. Part of the reason Mad Max 5 is taking so long is that Hardy’s slate is still filled with blockbusters even over seven years after Fury Road’s release, and Fassbender’s career also shows no signs of slowing down having moved from strength to strength since 2015. However, Fassbender has arguably leaned toward darker roles than the comparatively quirky Hardy in this time, which may account for him missing out on the part of Max as he was busy playing Shakespeare’s tortured Macbeth back in 2015.
Although the controversial star is persona non grata in Hollywood for obvious reasons now, in 2015, Armie Hammer was a major blockbuster star and a serious contender for the role of Mad Max. However, The Lone Ranger’s historic failure likely hurt his chances of gaining the role, particularly when the major flop was a desert-set reinvention of a previously popular cult genre property. The Mad Max franchise even featured Western elements and imagery which likely made the Gore Verbinski movie’s failure all the more relevant, meaning that, despite being considered, Hammer eventually missed out on the role.
Although Joel Kinnaman has since become a bigger name, he was already relatively well-established by the time Fury Road arrived in cinemas, having appeared in The Killing and 2014’s Robocop remake. However, when Kinnaman was being considered for the part of Mad Max in Fury Road, the actor was almost an unknown outside of his native Sweden. According to the movie’s creators, Kinnaman did not even have an American agent at the time that he was considered for the part. Needless to say, this likely did not help his chances of gaining the role, although it didn’t stop Kinnaman from going on to gain major mainstream fame with a notable role in one James Gunn-directed blockbuster years later.
Rapper/actor Eminem is not a name that many Mad Max fans would immediately associate with the sci-fi franchise. However, surprising as it may seem, Eminem was in the running for the role of Max at one point—and it’s not as unlikely as it appears at first glance. Roger Ebert’s favorite Mad Max movie, Beyond Thunderdome, starred superstar singer Tina Turner as its anti-villain Aunt Entity, and pop icon Rihanna was considered for the role of Furiosa around the same time as Eminem was in the running for the part of Max.
There is no denying that Fury Road would likely have been a very different movie with Eminem in the lead, but reviewers were unanimous in praising the actor’s dramatic chops when his film debut 8 Mile was released and comedic cameos in Funny People and The Interview proved the rapper had considerable screen presence. Unfortunately for rap fans, Eminem ended up losing out on the role for Mad Max Fury Road, and movie history was changed forever when non-rapping blockbuster star Tom Hardy earned the part instead.