‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Director Reveals Tom Hardy “Had To Be Coaxed Out Of His Trailer” To Film, Fueling His Feud With Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron has openly spoken about how much trouble she had filming Mad Max: Fury Road with her lead co-star, Tom Hardy. But director George Miller recently revealed just what may have caused their rumored feud while filming in the Namibia desert

Speaking to The Telegraph, Miller initially chalked it up to their creative differences, noting, “They were just two very different performers.”

But he revealed, “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.”

Miller compared their differences to the on-screen tension between their characters, who became reluctant allies in the 2015 post-apocalyptic feature.

“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,” Miller said. “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.” 

As Variety reports, Theron admitted in the Mad Max: Fury Road oral history Blood, Sweat, & Chrome that she has since come to regret how she and Hardy handled their conflict at the time.

She said it felt like they were “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.”

In one instance detailed in the oral history, Hardy allegedly showed up to set three hours late while Theron waited in the War Rig in full costume and makeup.

“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,” camera operator Mark Goellnicht said. “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.”

Miller later said in his interview that he warned Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth about the psychological toll filming may take on 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,” he recalled telling them.

Taylor-Joy recently hinted at the difficult time she had filming the prequel film, in which she takes on Theron’s role as Furiosa.

“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” she recently told The New York Times. “I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”

When the NYT pressed her for more details about what made the production so difficult, Taylor-Joy shut down the line of questioning and told the outlet, “Talk to me in 20 years.”

Furiosa premieres in theaters May 24.