This was a challenge for Hardy in particular. On set, the film-making was broken down to an intricate series of set-pieces. He felt Miller was getting lost in the details and cobbling together a disjointed mess – and said as much.
“Acting in a movie which is visually driven… watching what a character does by seeing them through one physical event after another and seeing how it effects them was a very difficult story to tell,” he lamented in an official ‘making of” feature.
Theron had her issues too. She’d initially struggled to get inside the mind of Furiosa. The eureka moment came when she decided to shave her head. She called up Miller and explained that Furiosa needed a buzz-cut. How could she carry out complicated repairs on her 18-wheeler Rig (a modified Czech Tatra T815 truck) with a pony-tail getting in the way?
Out amongst the sands, Theron meanwhile found herself taking on the second role of big sister to the young stars playing Immortan Joe’s five wives – among the Zoë Kravitz , Riley Keough and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
“All of those young girls kind of turned to me as someone who would problem-solve for them, and this is not anybody’s fault — I only say this now because
I know George and I’ve experienced this with George, so I’d fully trust him,” she said. “But I’ve also trusted directors fully when I didn’t comprehend what they were trying to do, and it just turned into a mess.
“Tom really had moments of frustration, of anger,” explained Kravitz in the same piece. “Charlize did, too, but I feel like he’s the one who really took it out on George the most, and that was a bummer to see. But you know, in some ways, you also can’t blame him, because a lot was being asked of these actors and there were a lot of unanswered questions.”
Theron seemed surprised to have clashed with Hardy. “From what I hear, he’s not like that on every movie – I hear he’s had good experiences,” she said in an Esquire profile. “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.”
They tried to mend fences late in the day. Theron retired to her trailer one evening to discover a self-portrait of Hardy left by her co-star. The inscription on the back read: “You are an absolute nightmare, BUT you are also f______ awesome. I’ll kind of miss you. Love, Tommy.”
“We drove each other crazy, but I think we have respect for each other, and that’s the difference,” she said. “This is the kind of stuff that nobody wants to understand – there’s a real beauty to that kind of relationship.”
