“It was horrible! We should not have done that; we should have been better.”
Released in the summer of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road was the long-delayed latest entry into the post-apocalyptic franchise, and immediately set a new benchmark for action movies and incredible stunt work.
It received a score of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, it won six of the 10 Academy Awards it was nominated for and while the box office return was decent but not amazing ($375 million at the global box office from an estimated $185 million production budget), there is a prequel in the works.
Furiosa will see Anya Taylor-Joy play a younger version of the now-iconic character, with that movie currently scheduled to arrive in cinemas in May 2024.
However, even after all of these years, one of the biggest talking points from the movie was the feud between the movie’s two leads, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. Both stars have talked about their on-set beef in the seven years since the movie’s release, but a new oral history book, Blood, Sweat & Chrome, goes into even greater detail of their arguments, and the tension seems to be even worse than anyone could’ve thought.
Vanity Fair reveals a specific excerpt that seemed to be the breaking point for the film shoot, with the movie’s camera operator Mark Goellnicht saying:
“I remember vividly the day. The call on set was eight o’clock. Charlize got there right at eight o’clock, sat in the War Rig, knowing that Tom’s never going to be there at eight even though they made a special request for him to be there on time. He was notorious for never being on time in the morning. If the call time was in the morning, forget it – he didn’t show up.
When Hardy finally showed up on set three hours late, Theron had had enough. Goellnight continues:
“She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at him, saying, ‘Fine the fucking c*nt a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew,’ and ‘How disrespectful you are!’ She was right. Full rant. She screams it out. It’s so loud, it’s so windy – he might’ve heard some of it, but he charged up to her and went, ‘What did you say to me?'”
“He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point.”
In the book, Theron adds:
“It was like two parents in the front of the car. We were either fighting or we were icing each other – I don’t know which one is worse – and they had to deal with it in the back. It was horrible! We should not have done that; we should have been better. I can own up to that.”
Blood, Sweat & Chrome is available to purchase right now, while Mad Max: Fury Road is currently available to watch with a NOW Cinema Membership.
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