The yearslong process of casting 'Mad Max: Fury Road' involved dozens of future stars — and just as many what-ifs. An oral history, by kylebuchanan
Now picture Eminem and Gal Gadot in the image above. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by Warner Bros. I’ve always been fascinated by the process of movie casting. When I worked for Vulture, I used to put together an annual roundup of the stars who almost got cast in the year’s biggest movies, just because it was so tantalizing to imagine some of those superhero flicks or awards-season dramas with wildly different faces on the poster.
A casting director once described her process to me as akin to opening a lock: Once you land on one number, you spin to the next, all the while wondering, Is this combination actually going to work? Here, then, is the series of events that locked in the casting of Hardy and Theron, Fury Road’s most compelling and combustible pair.Ronna Kress : When I think of all the people who auditioned for that movie! We saw, at the time, what I consider now to be many of the movie stars of our day.
Mark Sexton : This is something I don’t hear about very much and that George never admits, but I have a very, very, very strong memory of George talking about Eminem for Max. George Miller: We did get in touch with him, though that’s as far as it went because we were going to shoot it in Australia at that point, and he simply didn’t want to leave home. I think he had the impression that if he could do it out of his home state, then he’d be up for it.
Tom Hardy : Nobody paid any attention career-wise to me in America until Bronson. It gave me a calling card and passage into America, where I’d always wanted to work. Tom Hardy: Initially, I was daunted because obviously Mad Max is synonymous with Mel Gibson and a much-loved character by many people. Todd Matthew Grossman : Jeremy and Armie were equally wonderful, but there was something about Tom in the room where it felt like that was Max, without a doubt. He had that kind of suppressed emotional dryness that you’d find in a postapocalypse and, buried underneath it, disdain for the world. There was this intensity that burned through the lens.
Tom Hardy: I was excited to get the job. It’s such a big fish to land that the seesaw effect, the other side of that, was everybody loves Mel as Max and nobody’s gonna want me. So it’s like being the new boy at school and set up in some way for failure immediately. Ronna Kress: Warner Bros. had that Mad Max audition for years. That’s all I’m saying! But we had an eye on Charlize the whole time, in the same way we had an eye on Tom.
Charlize Theron: Listen, I grew up on all the Mad Max movies. They’re very popular in South Africa. So that part of it, for me, was like, Oh shit, yeah, I wanna be in a Mad Max movie. Are you kidding me? I remember being 12 years old and my dad letting me watch it with him, and it was huge. I was raised on a farm in a country where I was kind of surrounded by violence. Watching the violence of Mad Max felt very visceral, very real, and very connected to my environment. I wasn’t scared by it.
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