Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: Chris Hemsworth, Lachy Hulme special bond revealed

Logie-winning actor Lachy Hulme has revealed more about his “full on” role in the latest Mad Max film and his special bond with Chris Hemsworth.

Lachy Hulme first met Mad Max director George Miller under slightly shady circumstances.

The aspiring young actor was fresh out of college, and still three years away from his first film role, when he decided to gatecrash the 1991 Australian Film Institute Awards.

The way Hulme tells it, rising star Russell Crowe, fresh from winning his best supporting actor award for Proof, was so impressed at his 20-year-old bravado that he bought him a beer. Then at the after-after-party he spied his hero Miller, who had conquered Hollywood with his Mad Max trilogy and The Witches of Eastwick.

“I peppered him with questions about Witches of Eastwick and what it was like to work with Jack Nicholson,” recalls Hulme. “He’d had a few red wines, so he was very loquacious with me and told me the whole story of the shoot. And it was unbelievable.”

It wasn’t until nearly three decades later that the pair reconnected, while the much of the country was locked down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

George Miller attends the Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Red Carpet at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals this week. Picture: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

In the meantime, Hulme had gone on to carve out a successful acting career of his own with film roles in the Matrix sequels, The Killer Elite and Any Questions For Ben? as well as TV roles in Offspring, The Hollowmen, Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch War (for which he won a Logie award) and Romper Stomper. Miller, meanwhile had gone from strength to strength, with two Babe films, the Oscar-winning Happy Feet and its sequel, and long-awaited and rapturously received Mad Max: Fury Road.

“We were in lockdown in 2020 and my agent rang and said ‘Dr George Miller wants to Skype with you tomorrow about a movie’. And I said to her, ‘Lisa, if you are f**king lying to me and this is a joke – then you’re sacked right now.

“So the next day – and bearing in mind we were in lockdown and hadn’t had any human contact in months – suddenly I had Dr George on my laptop. It was like having a guest in the living room and we had a 45-minute Skype session arranged and it ended up going for around four and a half hours. What actually kicked it off was he said ‘look, Lachy, I am doing this movie …’ and I said ‘yeah, I’ll do it’.

And he said ‘great – but you don’t know anything about it yet’ and I said ‘I don’t need to – I have wanted to work with you my whole life and I told you that back in 1991 AFI Awards’.”

That initial chat, during which the pair bonded over their favourite film The Godfather Part II, led to many more like it as the two became firm friends. The movie in question was Miller’s 2022 fantasy romantic drama, 3000 Years of Longing, in which Hulme played an Ottoman sultan, and that in turn led to Hulme scoring two roles in the latest chapter in the Mad Max saga – but a prequel to Fury Road – Furiosa.

Lachy Hulme at the Australian premiere of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga this month. Picture: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Again, Hulme didn’t much care what the role was, getting to work with Miller again – and on a Mad Max movie no less – was enough. Hulme still vividly remembers his first exposure to the post-apocalyptic action series as a 10-year-old, when he saw the black-clad, shotgun toting Mel Gibson in the poster for the second film while at the movies.

“I remember my fresh crawling then,” he says. “I still hadn’t seen the first Mad Max but I had locked it into brain ‘I gotta see these movies’.

“So to be part of them finally has been a lifelong dream and I think not just for me, but for any Australian actor worth their salt, you want to be part of these movies. To not just get one role in it but to get two completely distinct roles has just been heaven. I am a movie nerd, so this is like nerd-a-rama for me at the moment.”

“I always say that the Brits have James Bond and Harry Potter and the Yanks have Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones and we’ve got Mad Max Rockatansky – and now we’ve got Furiosa.”

So what does that say about the Australian national psyche?

“Well, I think we’re just a bunch of sick bastards, really,” Hulme laughs.

Hulme was initially cast in Furiosa as Rizzdale Pell, a one-eyed, terrifying-looking henchman to Chris Hemsworth’s power-hungry, villainous warlord Dementus. As is Miller’s wont, he encouraged all his actors to come up with a backstory for the characters and why they do the wicked things they do in the violent, irradiated Wasteland, where life is cheap and guns and ammo rule. Hulme says somewhat proudly that his backstory was so vile that he’s loathe to recount it, but when he shared it with his cast mates during pre-production in Sydney, it was met with stunned silence.

“After I finished, Dr George just goes ‘did you deliberately want to come up with the sickest backstory of any character in the history of the universe’,” he says. “And I went ‘yep’.”

Hulme had some mighty boots to fill for his other character in Furiosa – that of Immortan Joe. The masked warlord had been the main antagonist to the older version of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa and Tom Hardy’s Max in the Oscar-nominated Fury Road and was originally played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who died in 2020.

Lachy Hulme as Immortan Joe in a scene from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

Originally Miller was going to use body doubles and deepfake digital technology to recreate the character, but Hulme thought that Keays-Byrne, who also played the Toecutter in the original Mad Max, deserved better. He thought he could be the man for the job and told Miller so.

“I said ‘somebody needs to step up for Hugh – I want to step up and why can’t I play both roles?,” Hulme says. “I can do the voice and I said the character is all in the eyes anyway. You have to push through that costume with the eyes.”

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, Miller agreed – but for Hulme it was initially a case of being careful what you wish for. The elaborate costume, featuring impressing armour and a breathing apparatus designed to disguise a rotting body, was bulky and heavy, with boots that weighed 16kg and a skirt that was a further 20kg.

“If you go back and watch Fury Road, Hugh Keays-Byrne is doing things in that costume where he is running,” Hulme marvels. “If Hugh were still alive, I’d be 20 years younger than him, so what the f***? My first day I was staggering around like the tin man who hasn’t had the oil put in yet. It took about eight people to help me get up steps. It was full on.”

Chris Hemsworth as Dementus in Furiosa: a Mad Max saga.

On screen in Furiosa, Hulme plays both ally and enemy of Hemsworth’s Dementus, but he has nothing but praise for the actor himself. The pair go back years and used to share management – in fact Hulme took the then-little known actor out for a big night on the town on his first work trip to Hollywood. Hulme had also worked with Hemsworth’s mother Leonie on the Working Dog comedy The Hollowmen, in which she played a secretary.

“To finally be on set with Hemsworth after all these years was great,” says Hulme. “We had stayed in touch and he’s a great guy, I really am so very, very fond of Chris.

“And of course he’s got this prosthetic nose that he’s wearing in the show and when I first walked up to him on set on day one and said ‘Hemsworth, you’ve waited your whole f--king life look like Lachy Hulme, haven’t you?’

“A lot of crew members had worked with him on the previous Thor and they were saying ‘man, he’s really putting in’. And it’s true. You wait your whole life for an opportunity and a role like that, and he didn’t drop the ball. He really pushed himself.”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in cinemas on Thursday.

Originally published as Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: Chris Hemsworth, Lachy Hulme special bond revealed