Can you believe it’s been five years since Mad Max: Fury Road came out??
At the time, there was a lot of speculation about a feud between its two main characters: Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.
While both actors dodged the subject for a while, they’re done hiding.
A new interview with The New York Times has these former co-stars addressing the elephant in the room.
Ever since *Mad Max: Fury Road* came out, there have been rumors of a rift between co-stars, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.
In 2016, Theron even confirmed this while she had an interview with WSJ Magazine .
“From what I hear, he’s not like that on every movie – I hear he’s had good experiences,” Theron said.
“Maybe the movie is what it is because we struggled so much with each other, and those characters had to struggle so much with each other.”
“If we were chum-chum, maybe the movie would have been 10 times worse.”
The film’s director, George Miller, also spoke out about their dynamic.
“The trajectory of the character can’t help but seep into the work,” he said.
“When they first meet each other, they’re trying to kill each other.”
“As the two characters come together out of necessity and rather reluctantly, they have to find a degree of trust. And to some extent that was the trajectory of their relationship as well.”
As if that wasn’t proof enough, Zoë Kravitz confirmed the feud while on *Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen*.
“Yeah…They didn’t get along,” she said about her co-stars.
“We were also in the desert for so long. I think everyone was tired and confused and homesick and we saw nothing but sand for six months. It’s just, you go crazy, you do.”
When Tom spoke to *Esquire U.K.* about the comments Charlize made, he admitted that he was hurt by it.
“That’s disappointing. I think she is awesome. I think she’s incredible. I think she’s one of the most talented actresses of our generation,” he said .
Now, in 2020, both Hardy and Theron spoke out about the film in an oral history for *The New York Times*.
Theron began by revealing that she and Hardy butted heads a lot due to the stress on set (filming was shut down three times).
“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,” Theron said of Hardy.
“That is frightening!”
In case you didn’t know, Gibson played Max in the first three of the films, all of which were filmed by George Miller.
Things became even more tense when there were several false starts in production.
Charlize also revealed that the script was unusual and something she wasn’t used to since Miller directed the film using storyboards instead of a script.
“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,'” said Theron.
“In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival.”
She continued:
“The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. I was incredibly scared because I’d never done anything like it. I think the hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head and I was so desperate to understand it.”
As for Hardy, he agreed with the things Theron was saying.
“I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times,” he told The New York Times .
“What [Theron] 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.”
“Because of how much detail we were having to process and how little control one had in each new situation, and how fast the takes were — tiny snippets of story moments were needed to make the final cut work — we moved fast.”
He continued: “And it was at times overwhelming. One had to trust that the bigger picture was being held together.”
Hardy also gave a complimentary assessment of Theron as Furiosa.
“Charlize arguably laid down the finest lead character in an action movie, and that credit is much deserved, in my opinion,” he said.
“Both to her as a phenomenal talent and also to George for recognizing from the very start that it was time to pass Mel’s shoes onto Furiosa.”
There you have it, folks!
For more of the actors’ interview, you can read it here .
h/t: The New York Times
