14 DAY TRIAL // When “Mad Max: Fury Road” drops in theaters this May, it comes with a 2-year delay and a luggage consisting of rumors and reports of trouble on set: trouble with the budget, the script, the actual production, and with the two leading stars, Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy.
A while back, Hardy tried to deny reports that he and Charlize would fight like cats and dogs in between takes and that they pretty much hated each other. He came clean in his most recent interview, and now Charlize does too: yes, there was a lot of fighting on set.
“We went at it, yeah”
The Oscar-winning actress is the cover girl for the May 2015 issue of Esquire magazine. Incidentally, Hardy came clean about the rising tensions on set to the same mag, just some weeks before.
In the interview, Charlize talks about being a celebrity, the new man in her life, boyfriend Sean Penn, and how the romance took them both by surprise, and her latest film, for which she was holed up in the desert for almost 7 months.
“Fury Road” was shot in Swakopmund in Namibia, on the edge of the Namib Desert. There was little script to go by, and most action scenes were shot without a green screen, because director George Miller wanted them to be as convincing as possible.
This translated into the cast and crew driving for hours on end in the maddening heat, without an actual destination, reshooting the same scene over and over again. Everybody on set fought, Charlize says, but particularly she and Hardy, and Hardy and Miller.
“We [expletive]ing went at it, yeah. And on other days, he and George went at it,” she explains. “It’s material that’s really frightening - we didn’t have a script. Tom and I are actors who take our jobs seriously. Both of us want to please the directors we work with, and when you don’t know if you can deliver on that, it’s a frightening place to be - and for Tom more than me, because he was stepping into big shoes.”
Those would be the shoes of a leading man who carries his own big budget movie, which will hopefully turn into a franchise. Hardy has been acting for a very long time and already counts on a loyal fanbase (and has won over the critics, which is equally important), but he’s yet to headline a production as huge as this one.
Tensions arose and sparks flew on set, his co-star says. She liked it this way, because at least they both knew where they stood at all times and they could improve on whatever needed improving.
There’s nothing in this world that Charlize hates more than two-faced co-stars who smile in your face and stab you in the back, or make work impossible for you.
There was screaming, but there was also a lot of respect
Still, Charlize doesn’t regret the experience and it doesn’t sound like she hates Hardy. Echoing his words from his own interview, she says she has nothing but respect for him and counts working with him as an honor.
She recalls that his parting gift to her, after shooting wrapped, was something that he made himself and signed with a note that told her she was horrible to work with but “also [expletive]ing awesome.”
“There’s a real beauty to that kind of relationship,” Charlize says, because it’s based on earned respect and trust. Of course, she didn’t expect the media to know or report on it, so she wasn’t surprised when she heard the stories of how much they hated each other.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” opens in theaters next month.