Why George Miller’s Mad Max Furiosa was the role that made Chris Hemsworth nervous
Chris Hemsworth is Hollywood box office gold, but when it came to vying for a role in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga he was ready to “audition” for George Miller.
Once upon a time, half a million years ago, when swirling planetary matter had just come together to form the earth, Las Vegas was a lush, green place of rolling meadows. This was thousands of years before our primordial ancestors got their sea legs; by the time humans figured out the business of being alive, the springs had all dried up and what was once an oasis was now desert, rust red and desiccated – akin if only on first glance, to a post apocalyptic wasteland – as far as the eye can see.
And you can see pretty far, actually, from the terrace at Nobu Villa, inside Caesar’s Palace, a 4000 room metropolis on the Las Vegas strip. It is here, one April morning during the annual CinemaCon film industry convention, that we catch up with George Miller and Chris Hemsworth, who are starting their day.
Since 2021, when Furiosa was announced, Miller and Hemsworth have inhabited the dual roles of mastermind and muse to one another. For the Oscar-winning auteur’s return to the world of his most iconic creation Mad Max, Hemsworth plays Dementus, a big, bad, bearded war lord astride a motorbike chariot.
By the time The Weekend Australian Magazine arrives to photograph the pair, their dynamic is clear. Miller, who at 79 still retains a sprightly demeanour, is all affectionate, avuncular wisdom, while Hemsworth, 40 years old and one of our great action heroes, is pure undiluted charm. You don’t need me to tell you that Hemsworth is handsome, but seeing him in full-pelt movie star mode is a sight to behold: shining blue eyes, arms like pistons, and with the warmed over glow of a man who has been tanned since birth.
Most people come to Vegas to gamble. But if you’re one of Australia’s most legendary filmmakers and his homegrown star, you come to Vegas to tell the world – or more specifically, about 6800 distributors and marketing executives – about your new movie. When it comes to the Furiosa project, these things are not mutually exclusive. Tom Hardy, star of Miller’s 2015 epic Mad Max: Fury Road, the artistic precursor to Furiosa (albeit, in plot timeline terms, its predecessor), has described the making of that film as a “fetish party. In the middle of the desert.” On any given Thursday through Sunday, this is as good a description of Vegas as any. Like Vegas, the world of Fury Road is rust red, haunted by the promise of a Green Place that no longer exists and yet in Furiosa, releasing in cinemas at the end of May, we will finally get to see that Green Place in all its verdant glory.
And, like the punters who flock to Las Vegas to park up on the casino floor, Miller and Hemsworth have rolled the dice. At a budget of $US233m ($343m), Furiosa, filmed entirely in NSW, is the most expensive Australian movie ever made. It’s also the role of a lifetime for Hemsworth, whose villainous Dementus is as far from Marvel’s god-among-heroes Thor as you could possibly imagine. And for Miller, it’s the ultimate gamble. When his Fury Road dawned, three decades after the final Mel Gibson Mad Max Beyond The Thunderdome, it was, despite everything (multiple shutdowns, once-in-a-generation rain that turned Broken Hill into a green place, heart stent surgery, feuding cast members, studio meddling) a critical and commercial hit. Going on to win six Oscars from 10 nominations, it was heralded as one of the best films of the decade by every publication worth its newsprint. The movie is an unmitigated triumph, with action sequences that feel almost as daring and exhilarating as they must have been to film, and watching it almost a decade after it was first released still feels like witnessing someone pull off the impossible. So, what makes a man go back to the table when he’s already won the house?
Ask George Miller about meeting Chris Hemsworth and he’ll tell you a very different story than what Chris Hemsworth told you, only two minutes before. They are sitting just off the terrace of Nobu Villa; Hemsworth has his arm slung casually over the back of the couch. Miller, who has made a body of work out of his indelible perspective, seems tickled by the disparity in their recollections. “Listen, I grew up with a twin brother,” Miller begins, “we spent the first 20 years of our life together, and the same experiences – we have a different point of view, or a different take on it.”
Hemsworth’s take: in 2015, he bought a ticket to see Fury Road and experienced a creative reawakening reverberating deep within himself. “This is the best film I’ve ever seen,” Hemsworth thought. “I have to work with George. Whatever he’s doing next.” The actor rolled up to Miller’s Sydney offices in 2020, ready to prove himself. He was nervous. This meeting felt like an audition, which was something Hemsworth, who at that point had been wielding Thor’s hammer for almost a decade, hadn’t been asked to do in years. They talked for a long time about philosophy, psychology, the meaning of life. “On the way out, you said, ‘oh, I’d love to do this with you’,” Hemsworth recalls. “I got to my car and called my agent, and he said ‘How’d it go?’ And I said, ‘I think I got the part. But I’m not sure if he just said (that) … meaning, maybe, who knows?” (Miller meant: I’d love to do this with you.)
Now, Miller: “The first thing I remember is walking to the gate, and the gate had a spring on it … and the gate sprung back, and Chris’s hand was on the catch, and as it swung back – it was my mistake – and you suddenly pulled your finger out,” chuckles the director. He thought: “Thank goodness I didn’t damage his hand on the first meeting. And secondly, boy, he’s got great reflexes.”
These exchanges perfectly convey the vibe of both men. Talk to Hemsworth and he will be unfailingly disarming and self-deprecating; give Miller the chance and he’ll unspool a poem of a memory about something only he could have noticed. And it will be something crucial: you can’t make a Mad Max movie, certainly not one like Furiosa, with 145 vehicles, 110 motorbikes and a 15-minute centrepiece action sequence composed from 197 intricately choreographed shots, if you don’t have great reflexes.
PJ Voeten, the first assistant director and producer on both Fury Road and Furiosa, said in Kyle Buchanan’s 2022 book Blood, Sweat and Chrome that Miller “saw Chris initially as a courtesy and then fell in love with the idea”. It happened right there in that meeting. “It was during that conversation that I realised there was so much more to you than meets the eye,” Miller says, turning to Hemsworth.
For the past year, Miller has been “in the dark” in the editing suite, tinkering away on the final cut of the film. “Basically watching Chris,” he smiles. “What happens to a director when you’re watching a film over and over, you only see the character, and I only see this character, Dementus. So whenever I see Chris, every time, the same thing happens to me … I think …”
“Nice to meet you,” Hemsworth interjects, with a grin.
Miller continues: “This is an impostor! Because the character is so palpable. And to be honest, when you’re working with really good people it becomes a much smoother and almost pleasurable process when you’re working on the film, and that’s what happened … we had a very good shoot with very good people.”
Over the years, Miller has learnt that thisisn’t always the case. “The toughest film I ever had to make was the very first Mad Max film,” he admits. “I had no real experience. It was all theory.” Miller trained first as a doctor before making the switch to filmmaking. (When money was low on Mad Max, he would take on emergency department locum shifts for extra cash.) “Even Mel Gibson had not really done a film before, he was straight out of NIDA,” Miller says. “We were all pretty inexperienced. I ended up basically being bewildered by filmmaking.” A beat. “I learnt then that that’s normal.”
Released in 1979, the first Mad Max is one of the most influential Australian films of all time, a visceral, gutsy, revved up thriller that turned Gibson into a global superstar. Hemsworth remembers watching it with his dad and “imagined inhabiting that world” not as an actor but as a kid, invigorated by sheer adventure. Two more followed in quick succession in the ’80s, and then an excruciatingly long pause – during which Miller went Hollywood with The Witches of Eastwick, produced Babe and directed its sequel, as well as two animated Happy Feet movies, the first of which won him an Oscar – while Fury Road crawled to the big screen.
From the outset, the 2015 film was plagued by chaos. More than once, production was shut down right before it was due to commence. Then Gibson, over a few years, faced drink driving and domestic violence charges. He was replaced by Tom Hardy, who was joined by Charlize Theron as the fearless road warrior Furiosa. The second highest season of rain in more than a century hit Broken Hill, and the rust red desert became carpeted with wildflowers. Filming moved to Namibia. Miller underwent heart stent surgery just before cameras rolled. Hardy and Theron fought openly on set. Studio executives flew to Africa to rein in a production that appeared to be going off the rails. Miller was instructed to cut the opening and closing segments. Years later, reshoots in Sydney allowed him to finally finish the film.
Even then, studio interference threatened to pierce the integrity of Miller’s final cut.
“You’ve gotta triage it,” Miller sums up, the former physician in him rising to the surface. “All the things that happened on Fury Road that were negative did not get in the way of making the film, we just had to pay no mind to the thunder, as they say, and keep your eye on the intention.” Miller breezily describes the litany of issues as “superficial”. “There was trouble from the studio, there was trouble between Tom and Charlize, but it didn’t get into the heart of the production,” he stresses, which is why he was so certain he could return once more to the world of Mad Max. “There was no trepidation about going to Furiosa,” he says. The story had been playing in his head since the earliest days of Fury Road, when Miller and his writing partner Nico Lathouris fleshed out Furiosa’s backstory into its own screenplay, which followed her from when she was stolen from the Green Place by Dementus as a child. Initially, it was designed to serve as backstory for Theron, but there was such depth to her desperate odyssey. “The process is one thing,” Miller sums up. “The actual material is another.”
Because the film spans Furiosa’s youth, before the events of Fury Road, Theron could not return. Anya Taylor-Joy, of The Queen’s Gambit fame, was cast. The film shot in 2022 across NSW in Broken Hill, Hay and Kurnell, injecting $350m into the local economy.
Both Hemsworth and Miller live and work in Australia; Hemsworth in Byron Bay with his wife Elsa Pataky and their three children, and Miller in Sydney’s Vaucluse. “LA was getting a little bit much and we thought, where do we want to raise kids? We looked all around the world, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Spain, Europe and so on, and ended up back in Australia on holiday, went to Byron Bay and went, this feels right,” Hemsworth says. “Being removed from the work is really nice … Not being constantly reminded of the industry and feeling like you’re having fulfilling conversations that are replenishing and inspiring, and they’re about other things than Hollywood.”
Hemsworth was instrumental in bringing production on two of his Marvel blockbusters, Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love & Thunder, to Australia. “I’ve turned down a lot of films over the years just because of being unable to shoot in Australia,” Hemsworth reflects. “I have three kids and a wife, and the older my kids get, to upheave their life and try to replicate that somewhere else is becoming more challenging.”
But Furiosa marks Hemsworth’s first purely Australian film, and a return to a local production for the first time since he swapped Home and Away for Hollywood in 2007. “This film is unmistakably set in Australia, and every accent, effectively, is Australian,” says Miller. The director can remember a time when the world looked down upon Australia, and in particular our local film industry. “When I first went to America in ’76, they’d say, ‘I didn’t realise you speak English. I thought you were Austrian?’ That happened in LA, a number of times.” Today, Australian film crews are sought after. “We have a really interesting work ethic, which I like to call a relaxed discipline,” he explains. “Rigorous, but it’s not hierarchical.”
Where once there was what Miller calls a “talent drain”, now Australia is in the throes of a talent boom. “Filmmakers I meet overseas tell me all the time, what is it about you guys, you seem to be able to get things done in a much more relaxed way,” Miller says. “You need relaxation to think, to be resourceful, to find the optimum way of solving a problem.”
Miller says all this, sunk comfortably into a pile of cushions, his hands resting in his lap.
Hemsworth, however, can’t stop fidgeting, switching seating positions and moving his arm up and down the back of the couch. “I’m not great at sitting still,” he admits, “I didn’t do too well at school for that reason.” It was hard for him to relax into the daily four hours in the makeup chair necessary to turn him from Chris Hemsworth, Movie Star, into a biker war lord. But then he decided to lean in. “Having glue and yak hair stuck to my face … I felt an unease,” he reflects. “I was able to use that.” By the time Hemsworth was unleashed from the trailer, moustachioed and prosthetic-nosed, he was like a coiled spring. Like a shark that “never stopped moving and hunting”.
Now, upon reflection, he welcomes prosthetics. “I prefer it, I gotta say, to wear a greater mask,” he muses. “You realise that so much of the work is being done for you, now you can let go, and have the mindset of the character. I remember Anthony Hopkins said something like that to me years ago, where he walked on set in the first Thor film in the costume … No acting required, is what he said.”
There was, actually, plenty of acting required to play Dementus. Some of the most thrilling performances have materialised when a movie star employs the force of their public persona as counterweight, rather than ballast: Tom Cruise in Collateral, Denzel Washington in Training Day, Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained. It’s more than just simply watching someone you know best as a hero behave like a bad guy. It’s about tying a knot in someone’s natural charisma to use it as a whip. Miller likens it to the line between temptation and threat. “I don’t know if you’ve been in the presence of a tiger,” Miller asks. “Utterly beautiful, and you just want to reach out and pat them, and stroke them. And the animal trainer is sort of saying, ‘go back a little bit!’.” Hemsworth has explored this before, in 2018’s Bad Times At The El Royale, when he played a dangerously alluring cult leader. But Furiosa is on another level.
In their first meeting, Hemsworth said as much to Miller. “What excited me about the role was that it was certainly going to be a nice contrast to my public persona,” he recalls. And there was also a creative challenge that was galvanising – and novel. “I hadn’t been allowed that opportunity yet,” he admits.
Miller remembers it this way: “I think you said something like, ‘I think people think I’m okay. They think I’m funny.’”
Hemsworth laughs. “I don’t think they take me very seriously.”
Furiosa is going to change that, and is the work Hemsworth is most proud of in his career. Judging by the extremely top secret footage I was granted permission to see at the time of writing, he should be. It’s a full-bodied performance, with a voice and mannerisms and menace, and the movie itself looks like a breathless, cacophonous joy ride. This same clip of footage, according to a report in Variety, “played f-cking awesome in the room” at CinemaCon in Vegas.
Still, Hemsworth struggled to find his way into the character. Dementus rattled around in his head for two years after that first meeting, during which he shot another film (Thor: Love & Thunder) and so did Miller (Three Thousand Years of Longing), on his-and-his soundstages at Sydney’s Fox Studios. “In previous experiences, there’s an immediate intuition like, ‘I got it’,” Hemsworth remembers. “Maybe two weeks before we started shooting, I had a bit of a panic. The light bulb hadn’t gone off.” Miller suggested writing diary entries in character as the charismatic dictator. Hemsworth had never tried anything like that before, but at midnight one night, unable to sleep, he put pen to paper. And it worked. Hemsworth had been fixated on “how he’s going to walk, talk, move. But the real stuff … the ‘why’, I hadn’t explored … I showed it to George and we both went, ‘this is it’.”
On reflection, Hemsworth admits it was a huge, Vegas-high-roller gamble. “That was unusual in my experience to get that close to shooting, have that much time to think in prep, and still not feel like I was 100 per cent certain,” he says. “But I would like to take that into other roles now, not having to have a definitive answer. That puts you into a box, and going into this with a certain amount of valuable fear and uncertainty gave it a spontaneity, I think. But that was a big roll of the dice, and you’ve gotta do it with someone in partnership, with someone you really trust. That was why this was the most enjoyable experience I’ve had.”
Hemsworth also enjoyed sharing the screen with the performers who made up his biker horde, some seasoned veterans of the franchise, some straight out of drama school, and a few fresh out of prison, with no acting experience to speak of. “People who had been passed over by society,” he muses, “finally someone who’d seen something in them and said, ‘come here. I’m gonna give you a shot’.” What Hemsworth witnessed was true humility. “The overwhelming appreciation … I found unlike anything else. There was no ego.” Hemsworth credits this, and so much more, to Miller. “As chaotic as the trucks, the noise (were) … it was actually an incredibly calming space. Having George at the helm, that’s why. In anyone else’s hands, it would’ve imploded.”
The truth is that until he met Hemsworth, Miller was at a loss as to how to cast Dementus. “Up to the moment of meeting you, I couldn’t think of an actor to play the role,” he admits. But he could never have envisaged what eventuated, which is that Hemsworth came to understand not only Dementus but, on occasion, the story of Furiosa better than Miller. There are two moments where, he tells Hemsworth, “you changed the course of the film”, which is something the director has only experienced a handful of times, with “great actors”. Miller declines to share more, because “they are significant in the movie”, which audiences are yet to see. “I’m really grateful for that, by the way,” he adds, as Hemsworth laughs. “The worst thing is the film is nearly finished cutting, and to sit there and either you, or someone like my partner Margaret Sixel, who is one of the editors on this film, say ‘George, you should have done this!’ Or I say to myself, ‘why didn’t I think of it?’ That’s a terrible feeling.”
Miller finished the movie just days before wespeak, in advance of its premiere in Sydney next week en route to a berth at the Cannes Film Festival. Editing it has been a pleasure, in no small part because he got to watch Hemsworth become one with Dementus. “Watching you find that, and then it emerging during the cutting, was really, to be honest, really creatively thrilling,” he says. “It remains to be seen if other people have that response.”
There’s a saying from East Swahili that Miller loves: The story has been told. If it is bad, it is my fault because I’m the storyteller. If it’s good, it belongs to everybody. Miller really believes that. More than once, he’s told a story that belongs to everybody: a man seeks revenge in the embers of a wasteland, a pig dreams of becoming something more, a woman chases down her past to try and save everybody’s future. Miller turns 80 next year, and like many of his peers including Martin Scorsese, 81, and the 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola – who will debut his latest, a self-financed saga called Megalopolis at Cannes alongside Furiosa – his passion has not dimmed.
“I’m quite surprised that I’m still doing it, sometimes,” admits Miller. “But the fact is that I’m still intensely curious about the process. It’s something you could do for a thousand years and never fully master. The moment you lose that curiosity, about every level of the process, is the time you no longer should be doing it. For me, it’s still there.”
Hemsworth has ambitions to direct. “If I was to do it, I would want to sit with George for a few months prior and go, ‘how do I do this?’,” he reflects. According to Miller, there’s “basically three” pieces of advice. “Sit down as often as you can,” Miller begins. “Make sure everything is played faster than you think it should be on the set, because the audience is in repose.” And thirdly? “The day will come when you’ll think that you, and the film, are completely crazy.” Miller gave this exact advice to someone setting out and after wrapping their first film, they responded: “What you didn’t tell me is that it will happen every day.”
The thing is that there will be a day when everything is a chaotic mess. And that day will be every day. But that day will also be the day when you get to tell the story that has been playing in your head for so long it feels like it has entered your bloodstream, becoming less an idea than a life force. A mantra. And that is the kind of thing worth gambling for.
Hemsworth’s first day on Furiosa was one such crazy day, with reams of dialogue to chew on. (He was cheated: the first day on Fury Road involved stunt co-ordinator Guy Norris rolling a car 11½ times.) “I thought, oof, I’ve been thrown in the deep end here. I came off with the usual, shoulda, coulda, woulda. Did it work?”
Angus Sampson, reprising his role as the rust red wasteland’s Hippocratic oath-defying surgeon, The Organic Mechanic, grabbed Hemsworth by the shoulders and shook him so thoroughly that all his anxieties fell away.
“‘Chris! You’re in a Mad Max movie!’,” Hemsworth laughs. “And I was like, ‘Shit you’re right.’ I am. I am!”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in cinemas on May 23.
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