Once upon a time, Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy were at war. Back in 2012, the duo were costarring in Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s action epic shot in the Namibian desert. Rumors quickly flew that Theron and Hardy clashed on set, which Mad Max costar Zoë Kravitz later confirmed in a 2017 interview. “They didn’t get along,” she said with a shrug. Now, all these years later, Theron and Hardy have confirmed the feud themselves in the New York Times oral history of the 2015 action masterpiece.
Theron, who played Furiosa in the film, said that “in retrospect, I didn’t have enough empathy to really, truly understand what he must have felt like to step into Mel Gibson’s shoes.” Hardy played the titular role, taking over the part that Gibson made famous in previous Mad Max films.
“That is frightening!” Theron continued. “And I think because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, ‘This is scary for you, and it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.’ In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival.”
Hardy also spoke to the Times, agreeing with Theron’s sentiment. “I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways,” he said. “The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced, partner in me. That’s something that can’t be faked. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.”
Kravitz (natch!) also weighed in on their feud, saying Hardy “really had moments of frustration, of anger. Charlize did, too, but I feel like he’s the one who really took it out on George the most, and that was a bummer to see. But you know, in some ways, you also can’t blame him, because a lot was being asked of these actors and there were a lot of unanswered questions.”
As the oral history lays out, Fury Road weathered a particularly long and grueling road to production. Once filming actually began, the actors spent nine months in the Namibian desert, which was apparently so cold that it gave costar Riley Keough hypothermia. “There were night shoots that were brutal, and there was so much dust that your face would be covered with three inches of sand by the end of the day,” she told the Times. “We kept it together pretty well, I think, for the first five months.”
Thankfully, the film was a resounding success once it premiered at Cannes in 2015, grossing nearly $375 million worldwide and landing six Oscar wins. Talks of a sequel have abounded for years, but Miller hasn’t been able to get it off the ground just yet. In the meantime, however, he is working on Three Thousand Years of Longing, another epic that will star a different A-list pair: Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.
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