Mad Max: Fury Road’s Casting Process Sounds Like It Was a Battle of Its Own
Stars who auditioned for Mad Max: Fury Road but didn't get roles are still telling their stories.
It took George Miller a long time to make 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. He began developing the project around the turn of the millennium, but the director faced major setbacks, including filming location challenges, budget concerns, and the fact that his former leading man, Mel Gibson, was no longer a viable casting choice. Yet when it finally arrived, both critics and audiences seemed to agree that the post-apocalyptic action film was worth the wait.
With Gibson out, Miller had replaced him with charismatic English actor Tom Hardy, but before the movie’s cast was even locked down, a handful of stars went through what sounds like an arduous audition process to land roles in Fury Road, and this week, some new stories have emerged about the battle to make it to Miller’s wasteland.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot recently told host Josh Horowitz that she and Marvel mainstay Tom Hiddleston went through a four-hour audition for Fury Road in London that she described as “crazy,” but that they both lost out, which she was surprised by because she “felt good about the work that we did.”
Unlike Gadot, Kat Dennings (Two Broke Girls) auditioned opposite Hardy when it was her turn to impress Miller. It apparently took an incredible six hours to complete, and Dennings compared it to “an acting class, if it was the worst day of your life.”
On Threads, Dennings revealed that “At one point, they had us switch roles. They had the camera and had us like running around the corner. The worst part of it, I do believe, was when the acting coach told us to say the lines without saying the lines, encouraging us to just make noises instead of the lines.” She noted that Hardy seemed to thrive in the acting exercise, but that she was “dying.”
Dennings felt moved to share her audition story after an earlier interview with Michael Fassbender about his own Fury Road experience started recirculating on social media. Fassbender had spoken of his trial for Miller as “one of the worst auditions” he’d ever done, adding, “Oh my God, it was awful.”
Fassbender also admitted to arriving late to his audition. “I arrived, and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and they were like, ‘Fine.’ And then George Miller has this acting coach… and it was like, it was so excruciating,” he recalled. “I’ve been classically trained, so I have my process of, obviously, there’s an objective that the character has and activities that I’m gonna play to get it. So I felt like you’re teaching Granny how to suck eggs here. This guy really got on my nerves.” Ultimately, Fassbender said that he “couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
Previously, Hawkeye star Jeremy Renner revealed that his Fury Road audition was “the weirdest thing,” but also confessed that Miller’s movie was thankfully the last time he had to audition for anything. “It was a whole different experience [than most auditions]. You had to have someone watch you go through the comic and read the script, and then you leave it behind, you have to sign your life away, and this whole thing, security guards, it’s like, ‘what?’”
Though the cast that Miller landed on did a great job and Fury Road would go on to be nominated for ten Oscars at the 88th Academy Awards, winning six of them, none of the awards it was in contention for recognized the film’s performances, focusing on the direction, editing, and visuals instead.