‘Mad Max’ director opens up about Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron’s feud on ‘Fury Road’ set

Mad Max director George Miller has opened up about Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron’s on-set feud during the filming of Mad Max: Fury Road.

• READ MORE: Mad Max: Fury Road – Film Review

In a new interview with The Telegraph, Miller opened up about the notorious feud that broke out between the pair saying that at the heart of it, “they were just two very different performers.”

He explained: “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.”

He continued: “I’m an optimist, so I saw their behavior as mirroring their characters, where they had to learn to co-operate in order to ensure mutual survival. 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.”

In the Mad Max: Fury Road oral history book, Blood, Sweat & Chrome, Theron said her relationship on set with hardy “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.”

Both actors have since taken responsibility for their feud, saying the film’s gruelling schedule plus a lack of trust in each other contributed to the fall out.

Miller said that he spoke with the cast of his new film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, namely Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth before production on his latest began. The film is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road.

He told them: “You have to be obsessive about safety – physical safety, as the shoot goes on and fatigue sets in, but also psychological safety. It’s not like the wild old days.”

Some critics have already seen the new film, which arrives in cinemas on May 24, and have been very positive in their praise for the film.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich described the film as “really, really fucking good” and wrote about how it “operates in an extremely different gear than Fury Road (in ways that i suspect will frustrate some people), but also manages to make that movie even richer while carving its own legend in the Wasteland.”

Meanwhile, Collider’s Therese Lacson wrote: “I would and could easily watch 15 hours of Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Browne as Furiosa” while Fandango’s Erik Davis described the movie as “a ferocious & relentlessly paced epic that expands the story of Furiosa and the Wasteland while delivering the craziest chases, the most bombastic characters and just plain stunning cinematography.”

In other news, last month it was revealed that one action scene in Furiosa took 78 days to film,

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