Anna Daniels
To understand Fury Road‘s casting process, you have to understand what a long and furious road it was to the screen. By the time the movie roared into theaters in 2015, it had been a full 30 years since the previous entry in the series, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. In 2001, the original Mad Max, Mel Gibson, was slated to reprise the role he made famous. The story of that early attempt’s conception and ultimate dissolution is worthy of its own journalistic treatment; suffice to say, by the time Miller finally got around to revisiting his post-apocalyptic world, Gibson was simply too old to return as Max Rockatansky. Producer Doug Mitchell acknowledges that Gibson has made himself persona non grata in certain sectors of Hollywood, but he insists it was the age issue that ultimately excluded him from Fury Road.
“Mel is obviously blighted by a number of things that everyone in the world knows about,” Mitchell told the Times. “He’s a highly gifted filmmaker and a brilliant actor and a lovely guy behind that demon that sometimes pops out. But he was too old at that point. It just didn’t make sense.”
Zoe Kravitz, who played Toast, one of Immortan Joe’s (Hugh Keays-Byrne) escaped wives, also sat for the interview. She recalls doing a screen test opposite Jeremy Renner reading for Max. At that point, Hardy hadn’t yet landed the role, and the team was seriously considering plucking the Hawkeye actor out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and dropping him in the gasoline wasteland of Fury Road.
Written by: Looper
