It’s no secret that Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy did not get along on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite having such an intense chemistry during the audition process, that the casting director crashed her car, things went south during the grueling production, and there was a palpable tension between the two. In Kyle Buchanan’s new book, Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, Theron finally opens up about the inciting incident that left her terrified of working with Hardy, and not in a “wow, he’s so intensely into his role” kind of way.
“I don’t want to make excuses for bad behavior, but it was a tough shoot,” Theron said in a new excerpt from Blood, Sweat and Chrome. “Now, I have a very clear perspective on what went down. I don’t think I had that clarity when we were making the movie. I was in survival mode; I was really scared sh*tless.”
According to camera operator Mark Goellnicht, the situation came to head when Hardy was, once again, hours late to a morning shoot. Theron, however, was in full Furiosa make-up and showed up on time. So when Hardy finally showed up, she confronted him about holding up production. Via Vanity Fair:
Eleven o’clock. She’s now in the War Rig, sitting there with her makeup on and a full costume for three hours. Tom turns up, and he walks casually across the desert. She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at him, saying, “Fine the f*cking cunt a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew,” and “How disrespectful you are!” She was right. Full rant. She screams it out. It’s so loud, it’s so windy — he might’ve heard some of it, but he charged up to her up and went, “What did you say to me?”
He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point, because then she said, “I want someone as protection.” She then had a producer that was assigned to be with her all the time.
While Theron was provided with a female producer to check on her, she still felt “naked and alone” throughout the production after the incident. As for Hardy, he doesn’t deny his unprofessionalism.
“In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways,” Hardy said in the excerpt. “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.”
(Via Vanity Fair)