For years, rumors have circulated about Mad Max: Fury Road stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron feuded on the blockbuster sequel’s set, but a new book reveals the cause of their troubled relationship, the extent of their issues, and how the duo eventually buried their beef. Ever since Mad Max: Fury Road went into production, there had been chatter that the movie’s stars didn't see eye to eye. Although both Charlize Theron’s Furiosa and Tom Hardy’s Mad Max saw the actors receive critical acclaim for their central turns, their on-set tension was intense enough to reach the media before the movie’s production even wrapped.
Since then, neither actor has spoken out on their reported feud. Hardy and Theron’s seven-year silence on the matter has been punctuated by occasional asides about struggling with each other in interviews, but neither actor has ever delved into the specifics of their much-discussed feud. However, a 2022 book about Mad Max: Fury Road’s lengthy production finally sheds light on the story.
In Kyle Buchanan’s book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, the cause of the feud is discussed alongside the production difficulties that led to the movie’s tense work environment. The book speaks to a diverse range of players from Mad Max creator George Miller to camera operators and casting directors, to the pair’s co-stars and even Theron and Hardy themselves. Although the feud sounds intense, according to both the actors and their collaborators, Theron and Hardy’s issues with one another were resolved before the movie finished filming.
Tom Hardy’s Method Approach To Max Troubled Filmmakers
According to the extensive interviews collected by Buchanan, Tom Hardy’s approach to playing Mad Max was not one that made life easy for his collaborators. The filmmakers collectively agreed in retrospect that Hardy’s efforts were worth the trouble, with the actor offering a version of the antihero who diverged completely from Mel Gibson’s original Mad Max and essentially reinvented the sci-fi cinema icon. However, this impressive performance came at a cost to the actor and his collaborators alike. Some of Hardy’s in-character affectations, like wearing an earpiece to get a feel for Max’s police officer past, earned him the ire of the movie’s creators.
Both camera operator Jason Boland and cinematographer Mark Goellnicht euphemistically describe Hardy’s process as “tricky,” with casting director Lora Kennedy saying the actor was “misunderstood” due to him “taking everything so seriously.” This disposition eventually resulted in screenwriter Kelly Marcel warning Hardy that he didn’t want a headline reading “You Killed George Miller” in his near future, an anecdote that illustrates how deeply contentious many of the production’s staff found his process during filming. This alone could have made Mad Max: Fury Road a hard movie to shoot, but the movie’s lead actress did not have an easy time early in the filming process, either.
Charlize Theron Struggled While Shooting Mad Max: Fury Road
By all accounts, including her own, Theron struggled with Fury Road even before her beef with co-star Hardy. This was partially due to her less embodied style of acting clashing with Hardy's process but was also affected by external circumstances. For example, the actor had, according to Miller, “this aversion to dust,” an issue often exacerbated by the movie shooting in the Namibian desert and frequently encountering sandstorms. Theron also admitted that she was “incredibly scared” while shooting since she had never worked on a project like Miller’s Mad Max sequel, and added that she “didn’t always understand the narrative that we were telling.” This combination of struggling with the sequel’s story (although she maintained that she always understood Furiosa’s individual motivations) and the intense physical demands of the part took a psychological toll on the actor, meaning Theron was in no place to butt heads with the method-reliant, mercurial Hardy.
Hardy and Theron’s Feud During Mad Max: Fury Road's Filming Explained
According to Goellnicht, the fact that Hardy spent the shoot in character as Mad Max himself was what made the “tension so tough between him and Charlize.” However, that explanation wasn’t sufficient to diffuse the tension, which collaborators like actor Nicholas Hoult compared to being trapped in the backseat of a car while two angry parents argued in the front. By most behind-the-scenes accounts, the feud arose from Theron and Hardy’s fundamentally divergent approaches to the art of acting. Where Hardy is described by co-workers as “very physical and all over the place” and “provocative,” Theron’s contrasting acting process has been called “cerebral, consistent,” and “not [provocative].” The two could not have had less in common save for the one thing that both of them shared, which was unease around Miller’s directing process.
According to their colleagues, Hardy handled his uncertainty around Miller’s direction by constantly asking questions and needling the veteran director, while Theron’s role as Furiosa saw the actor take the opposite approach. Theron says she went into “survival mode,” wanting to get through each sequence and onto the next while her co-star wanted more explanation, more motivation, more character insight, and more time spent on every scene. This resulted in a pressure cooker atmosphere that producer PJ Voeten claimed made the tension visible in the air during filming, with the veteran producer saying the atmosphere felt as though it would implode even as early as the movie’s preproduction process.
How Hardy and Theron Got Through Their Fury Road Feud
According to Buchanan’s book, Theron and Hardy’s relationship on-set reached its nadir when Theron was left waiting for her co-star for three hours one morning during shooting. Hardy arrived for an eight o’clock call time after eleven, prompting Theron to angrily swear at the actor and admonish his lack of professionalism. Before the ending of Mad Max: Fury Road’s production, the two were on civil terms, but that peace was hard-won. After that incident, Theron asked that a female producer be brought to the set as she felt uncomfortable in the working environment, a claim that Hardy even now contests in an interview where he doubts whether “a very serious actor” like Theron “would ever be intimated by me.”
When Hardy and Theron's Feud Ended While Filming Mad Max
Although Theron never got her wish, according to Goellnicht, the process of shooting the scene wherein Furiosa, Max, the Vuvalini, and Immortan Joe’s wives leave the erstwhile Green Place signaled a sea change in the duo’s dynamic. The cinematographer claimed that Hardy visibly warmed to Theron after shooting that scene and the issues that had plagued the Mad Max movie's long production sank back into the background as the actors finally achieved mutual respect for each other. In recent interviews, Theron concedes that the movie’s workplace environment could have been more constructive while Miller admits that he wishes he did more to ensure the comfort of his actors and less to safeguard the sanctity of his artistic vision. However, Hardy and Theron’s Mad Max: Fury Road feud is seemingly very much buried, even if it may be a while before the pair are seen together on screen again.
