1979’s original Mad Max shares many parallels with its more high-octane 2015 sequel Fury Road, but one the weirdest is the first movie’s two nods to later franchise villain Immortan Joe’s gruesome fate. Released in 1979, the sparse, gritty revenge thriller Mad Max was a huge hit with audiences worldwide, making an overnight star of Mel Gibson in the title role and spawning a trio of critically-acclaimed sci-fi action sequels.
The original Mad Max was a darker, more grounded story than its far-fetched sequels, taking place before the offscreen apocalypse that the Mad Max series centers around has occurred. During the action of Mad Max, the societal breakdown has begun but the title character is still attempting to keep the peace in his job as a rookie cop in a crime-ridden metropolis, whereas in later sequels he is a wanderer moving from one post-apocalyptic tribal community to another in a lawless wasteland.
However, despite how much of a difference there is between the heightened reality of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road and the grounded original Mad Max, both movies do share a lot of DNA. For one thing, Fury Road tells a similar story to the original Mad Max, albeit from Furiosa’s perspective, and thus touches on similar themes of social decay in the process. Bizarrely, though, the earlier Mad Max also featured not one but two separate instances of characters foreshadowing the exact manner in which Fury Road’s central antagonist, cult leader Immortan Joe, dies at the end of the movie (specifically, by having his face ripped off).
Bizarrely, the original 1979 Mad Max features two references to characters losing their faces, one of which is spoken by the very same actor who would go on to eventually play Immortan Joe, Hugh Keays-Byrne. Long before he played the misogynistic cult leader, Hugh Keays-Byrne played Mad Max’s villain Toecutter (although his unforgettable performance was unforgivably dubbed over by the US edit of Mad Max). During the action of Mad Max, Toecutter tells the title character's doomed wife Jessie, “you lose the face, you’ve got nothing.” This advice would eventually prove true for his later Fury Road villain who is killed when Furiosa attaches his mask to the wheels of his rig, tearing the apparatus off and taking his face with it in the process.
This could be a strange coincidence, but what makes the moment weirder for viewers rewatching the Mad Max series is another moment in the original movie that also hints at this specific bloody fate. Max’s doomed partner Goose tells an anecdote in a diner about a gruesome car accident where a man’s face was ripped clean off—which, again, is exactly how Immortan Joe exits the action of Fury Road. Interestingly, this could also have been a piece of abandoned foreshadowing for the character of Goose himself, who is left badly burned and presumed dead at the end of Mad Max. Originally, Goose was intended to be revealed as the unseen face behind Lord Humungus’ mask at the end of Mad Max’s first sequel The Road Warrior. Regardless, it’s one of the weirdest coincidences in the Mad Max franchise, and one that acts as solid (if potentially unintentional) foreshadowing.