Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy head cast shooting Mad Max Furiosa in Broken Hill
Broken Hill has turned into Hollywood Down Under as stars head to the Aussie outback to film George Miller’s Mad Max Furiosa — and the locals couldn’t be happier.
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Hollywood is booming in the Aussie Outback.
With Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy leading the charge, the town of Broken Hill has become a hub of production as George Miller’s Mad Max Furiosa finally gets into full swing.
The major studio film is tipped as the largest production ever filmed in NSW and is expected to bring a $350 million boost to the state economy.
And locals are cheering from the sidelines.
“Broken Hill is going to be the next Hollywood of Australia, I have no doubt about that,” Mayor Tom Kennedy told The Daily Telegraph. “The people that live in town are excited to have particularly movie stars of Chris Hemsworth and others, you couldn’t have anything more exciting than what is happening in Broken Hill at the moment.
“We will be the Hollywood of Australia.”
A crew of around 800 means accommodation is booked out in Broken Hill and neighbouring towns, with the production supporting 850 local jobs.
It comes more than four decades after Mad Max 2 was shot in the area.
Production is set up on the Mundi Mundi Plains, about half an hour out of Broken Hill, on the same property that just a couple of weeks ago hosted the Mundi Mundi Bash with headliners such as Paul Kelly, Ian Moss, Shannon Noll and Kate Ceberano.
Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy have been seen at cafes and pubs across town.
Taylor-Joy, of The Queen’s Gambit fame, was spotted at The Broken Hill Pub during the week, spotted in deep discussion with British actor Tom Burke as other cast and crew ordered counter meals at the bar nearby.
Waitress Ashlee Nicholas scored a photo with Taylor-Joy, with the snap picked up and shared by fans across the world.
“She was so nice,” Nicholas said. “She was just lovely and kind.”
Trivia night at the Sturt Club was also packed, while Soull Cafe and Espresso Bar and The Silly Goat are the most popular spots for breakfast and a coffee fix before work.
PRODUCERS HIT THE MOTHER LODE
Broken Hill Mayor Tom Kennedy is lobbying to have something similar to the iconic Hollywood sign in LA built on The Line of Lode lookout overlooking town.
“We are a place that has 300 days of sunshine and that is a real appeal to movie studios,” Kennedy told Confidential.
“What they get is easy access to services, but you are guaranteed good filming, good production most days, so you are not held down with bad weather, raining and overcast conditions.”
Meanwhile, while most of the attention has focused on big names Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy, Confidential has spotted several other familiar faces around town.
Industry website IMDB lists just four names in the cast so far, in Hemsworth, Taylor-Joy, Tom Burke and Nathan Jones.
Confidential can reveal Lachy Hulme, David Collins (of Umbilical Brothers fame) and Angus Sampson are part of the production and have been spotted around Broken Hill this week.
They have all been seen at The Broken Hill Pub, where a production office is based in function rooms at the venue.
Hulme and Collins previously worked with director George Miller on his film Three Thousand Years of Longing, which had its world premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival at the weekend.
Sampson, meanwhile, played The Organic Mechanic in 2015’s Mad Max Fury Road.
Miller and producers have tried to keep casting details a close secret, and have been strangely quiet regarding any publicity for the production.
In an unusual move, no “unit publicist” has been assigned to the production. Confidential WAs told producers don’t feel they need one.
A number of locals have signed confidentiality agreements to ensure privacy, including landowner John Blore, who owns the property on which a massive tent city has been erected about 25 minutes out of Broken Hill.
Actors, including Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy, are staying in private houses, with production taking out rooms at pretty much every available hotel, motel and Airbnb across town.
ICONIC PUB LOOKING FOR NEW OWNER
Peter and Patsy Price won’t sell their outback pub to just anyone.
They’ve had the Silverton Hotel on the market since 2019, but held off through the pandemic as they continued to renovate the iconic Red Desert watering hole that has featured in major films including Mad Max, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, A Town Like Alice and Razorback.
“We live and breathe this pub and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it,” Peter told Confidential.
“We would just really like it to be in the right hands to take it to the next level.”
The couple have put a $3 million price guide on the property, which includes a seven-bedroom hotel and function area.
They bought the then-rundown pub for around $500,000 just under 13 years ago.
They are staying in the tiny town as they retire to a home “up on the hill”.
“We have gone from when we took it over, something that was doing probably $300,000 (annually) and now we are doing in excess of $2.5 million in turnover,” Peter said.
“Money is an important part of it, but I think the other ingredient is customer service and promoting your business in the right way to what your clients want.
“That has to continue, we see that as a very important model, and if you get it right, you will make a buck at the end of it.
“But if you just go in there constantly looking for turnover and pushing grog and meals, leaving some of those other things aside, it doesn’t work in the bush.
“It is as simple as that. You can get away with it in the city not in the bush.”
The couple isn’t interested in a big conglomerate from the city buying the pub.
“We reckon they would destroy it. You are buying something with a very strong history.”
Other productions to have shot at Silverton Hotel include Nicole Kidman’s Strangerland, Wake In Fright, Mission Impossible II and The Long Way Home.
Price is hoping Chris Hemsworth will pay the venue a visit while filming Mad Max Furiosa in the area to re-enact a photo taken at the pub of Mel Gibson when he shot Mad Max II.
It isn’t the only landmark property up for sale in the area, with Broken Hill’s Bell’s Milk Bar and the Astra Hotel also for sale.
FILM SET INSPIRES MEMORIES OF PRISCILLA
June Marie Bennett still feels “a little awkward” thinking about her scene in iconic Australian film, Priscilla Queen of the Desert.
Bennett, now 83, played gruff country pub local Shirl in the film and was an extra on set when she scored the part.
The scene saw Shirl confront actors Terrence Stamp, Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving as drag performers Bernadette, Felicia Jollygoodfellow and Mitzi Del Bra in the scene shot at the iconic Palace Hotel on Broken Hill’s main street.
“We’ve got nothing here for people like you,” Shirl said in the scene.
Bennett recalled wearing a white singlet she borrowed from her husband on the day.
“I still feel awkward talking about it because I was brought up in a different time, in a different generation where you didn’t discuss those things,” she said.
“I was horrified when I read the pages I had to learn. I have got used to it a little bit more but I don’t sort of dwell on those particular lines.”
Nearly three decades since Priscilla was released in 1994, Bennett is far softer in personality than the character of Shirl.
She has seven children, 17 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
“I didn’t appreciate it at the time until later,” she said of the starring role in Priscilla.
“I have understood it since because I didn’t understand about drag queens at that point. It took me several years to get it.”
Bennett estimates she has watched Priscilla more than a dozen times, noting her life “has been enriched from it”.
She is somewhat of a celebrity in Broken Hill and has “a great social life”. She is on the committee for the town choir and plays the organ in the church.
“Broken Hill has been good to me, I like the lifestyle,” she said.
“I can drive my little convertible around, I couldn’t do that in a capital city because it is a manual and sometimes it lets me down and I am too slow for the city runs.”
Hollywood, she laughed, was never an option for the part-time actor.
“I never thought about being in Hollywood, with my family here, but I wouldn’t have minded being taken there for a premiere or something.”
A long list of high-profile productions have shot in the area since Priscilla, and Bennett has continued with the odd acting job.
She had two small parts last year and is hoping to nab a spot alongside Hemsworth in Mad Max Furiosa.
“I’d like to be treated like Lady Muck,” she joked. “It is very exciting. I thought, ‘Now, would they have a role for me in Mad Max?’. It is very secretive on set, which I can understand.”
HEMSWORTH’S MUG A COLLECTOR’S ITEM
A black-and-red coffee cup that was used by actor Chris Hemsworth takes pride of
place at Soull Cafe and Espresso Bar on Broken Hill’s main street.
The mug, from which Australia’s biggest movie star drank a long black, sits on a shelf behind the coffee machine as a permanent reminder of Hemsworth’s visit.
“Chris was beautiful, very polite and just lovely,” the cafe’s Natalie Robinson told Confidential.
“The town is very busy, full-on with Mad Max.
“We are loving it. Everyone is very excited. It is a good little country town, very friendly and sweet.”
Hemsworth and actor wife Elsa Pataky have been seen out and about at several local eateries, happily posing for photographs and chatting to fans.
MUSEUM ON THE HUNT FOR ARTEFACTS
Adrian Bennett is hoping to snaffle a few pieces from set of Furiosa over the coming months.
The owner and curator of the Mad Max Museum in Silverton has his fingers crossed he will score some more memorabilia to show off at the facility alongside some of his favourite artefacts from George Miller’s original 1978 and 1980s films and 2015s Fury Road.
“It would be just fantastic if they came to see us,” Bennett said.
“I am quietly confident but I am not getting too excited.
“All I am going to do from now until when they finish filming is keep my fingers crossed and hope they do leave us something, it would be just incredible.”
Bennett moved to Australia from the UK 15 years ago and moved to the small town to set up his dream life.
He is a diehard Mad Max fan and remembers vividly seeing the first and second films as a double feature in 1981.
“There is a real buzz in town, not just here but in the area,” he said.
EMU ARTIST PAINTS A FAR-WEST WELCOME
Acclaimed local artist John Dynon has met prime ministers, sporting greats and movie stars. But fame doesn’t faze the low-key Dynon, who is known locally as ‘the emu man’ for his paintings of the unique Aussie animal.
Dynon lives in Broken Hill and works out of his colourfully eccentric gallery in the small town of Silverton, closer to the set of Mad Max Furiosa on the Mundi Mundi Plains.
“We are known for the movies, the art, the tourists and the landscape,” Dynon told Confidential.
“The contrasting colours of the blue and the reds is what people want to see.”
With so much rain over recent months, though, the usual landscape of red earth is plush green.
Locals had feared it may force director George Miller to take the production elsewhere.
“Now it is very green, which they don’t want, but George Miller is doing it anyway,” Dynon said.
“He was in here (Dynon’s gallery) the other day and said they are doing it no matter what.
“He said they’d mow the weeds, which they are doing. They are mowing it down to dirt.”
Dynon was born and raised locally. His celebrity clients have included former prime ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, as well as actors Guy Pearce, Donna Mills and Don Johnson.
BROKEN HILL REUNION FOR THE KID LAROI
From government housing to private jets — top Aussie muso The Kid Laroi has come a long way.
Keen to share in his success, Confidential captured a happy family reunion for Laroi’s mum, Sloane Howard, as she flew to Broken Hill by charter plane mid-week to pick up her elderly parents, Mary and Jeffrey Dunn. The round trip in the luxury plane is rumoured to have cost
around $40,000.
His grandfather, who is known as Kelly to family and friends, is in poor health and thus a nurse was on hand for the flight as they boarded the Falcon 900 flight to Sydney to attend their grandson’s triumphant first show of his sellout Australian tour at Qudos Bank Arena.
Laroi, whose real name is Charlton Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, famously grew up in the remote NSW mining town before moving to Waterloo in Sydney with his mum and brother.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Laroi is now one of Australia’s most successful music exports in decades, thanks to global hits Stay with Justin Bieber and Without You with Miley Cyrus.
His visit home to Australia included a trip to Sydney’s inner city suburbs on the weekend, where he donated $100,000 to a former youth centre where he spent time growing up.
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