'Mad Max' Director Says 'No Excuse' for Tom Hardy's Behavior on Set
He was infamously unprofessional during filming.
Filming Mad Max movies is no joke. Long days in grueling desert landscapes of Namibia can take a toll on anyone, and actors are pushed to their limits—sometimes physical, sometimes emotional.
Australian director George Miller, who has helmed the franchise since its inception in the 1970s, reflected on the two most recent Mad Max films in a new interview with The Telegraph. When looking back on 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road, he took a moment to comment on the infamous feud between stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. At the time, Hardy made headlines for his alleged unprofessional behavior on set, which reportedly started with chronic lateness and boiled over in a verbal confrontation between the two stars.
It wasn't exactly a harmonious working relationship, to say the least.
"They were just two very different performers," Miller said. "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."
As filming went on, however, the tension between the two ostensibly cooled in Miller's eyes.
"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," Miller said. He went on to note that getting method with it didn't come without its drawbacks. "There’s no excuse for it, and I think there’s a tendency in this business to use great performances as an excuse for other disruption that could be avoided," he said.
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Hardy, for his part, has apologized to both Miller and Theron over the years for his behavior. In 2015, he admitted in a press conference at Cannes Film Festival that he could've behaved better.
"The most frustrating thing for me or the hardest part [of filming] was trying to know what George wanted me to do at any given minute on a minute-by-minute basis, so I could fully [execute] his vision," Hardy explained at the time, per Vanity Fair. "But because [Miller was] orchestrating such a huge vehicle literally in so many departments, and because his signature is on every single detail [of the film] and because all of the [parts] in the vehicle are just moving, there is just motion."
"I have to apologize to you because I got frustrated and there is no way that George could have explained what he conceived in the sand while we were out there [filming]. And because of the due diligence that was required to make everything safe and to make everything that was incredibly complex so simple—which is what I saw—which is a relentless barrage of complexities simplified in a fairly linear story," he added. "I knew [Miller] was brilliant, but I didn’t know how brilliant until I saw it."
The 2022 book Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road chronicled the making of the movie with input from various crew as well as Hardy and Theron themselves. Theron confessed in the book that she was "scared s--tless" by the filming conditions and Hardy's short fuse, according to The Independent.
Hardy, meanwhile, acknowledged Theron deserved better out of her co-star. "In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times," he said, per The Independent. "What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion."
The difficult filming conditions of Mad Max movies seemingly haven't changed much. In a new interview with The New York Times about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, star Anya Taylor-Joy said she'd "never been more alone than making that movie" and declined to elaborate on what she experienced.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in theaters May 24. Mad Max: Fury Road is streaming now on Max.