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“And we got Tom up there! He’s afraid of heights, but he did it anyway.” - George Miller [long post] 

:::: Swinging on the scaffolding pole ::::

Q: What was the most daunting stunt you actually had to do yourself?

Tom Hardy: All of them actually, I’m not good with heights so the scaffolding pole was a bit of a mouthful especially when we had to go in for reshoots. In Australia we’d set up in a car park, and we had my own private scaffolding pole and I went down there and I was really jet lagged and Doug Mitchell was there and I said, “I really don’t want to go up the scaffolding pole” and he’s like, “hold my hand” and we walked down towards that, that was probably the only green screen I saw actually over at the car park it’s just a lonely walk to them, I got up in my cherry-picker and then Kia strapped me on and that was it. 

And there’s only about seven inches on the side of the scaffolding pole and it’s quite lonely and when the scaffolding pole goes that way you actually fall that way as well and when it comes back up to the middle you have to roll and fall the other way or else your face mallets the side of the scaffolding pole and that really hurts and there’s no one up there to complain to and it lasts as long as it has to. (X)

…. and you’re sort of drifting to the camera and away again. So that was fun!  (X)

George Miller: “The pole-swinging I never thought we could achieve. I never thought we could actually move the poles on the cars, and then one day I looked up and there were eight of them coming out of the desert swinging about. I thought, ‘Oh my god, we did it.’And we got Tom up there! He’s afraid of heights, but he did it anyway.”

:::: Suspended by cables upside down on the War Rig ::::

George Miller: “[And] when he’s hanging upside down between the wheels of a War Rig as it’s hurtling through the desert, that’s Tom Hardy inches off the ground being suspended by two big cables.”  (X)

Charlize Theron: “The one that was for me the most hairy was where Max falls off the rig and Riley’s character and my character kind of grab on to him, and I’m grabbing onto him with this mechanical arm that’s attached to my neck and body.” 

“And Tom, his head is that much off the ground and he’s just hanging there, and I’m just like ‘Dude, you’re awesome. If that was me, I would so not be cool with this.’ And I also realized, like, if he was gonna go, I was basically gonna go ‘cause this whole thing was gonna drag me with him. That stunt was a little scary for me,” Theron said.

Hardy says he was fine with the hanging-upside-down stunt, but it scared the daylights out of his 7-year-old son, Louis.

“George said to him, ‘Don’t worry, your daddy’s being held upside down by a couple of wires, Louie. They can hold a grand piano.’” Hardy recalled. “And he said, ‘But what if they snap?’ ‘Well, Louie, I suppose he’d go under the wheels.’ And that was that.” (X)

:::: The War Boys’ cave pursuit ::::


Guy Norris: “The challenge was, How to make a foot chase with the same intensity as a car chase? Another challenge was to design the action so that Tom Hardy could do it all himself. We shot it over an exhausting three days, with Tom and the stunt War Boys either running, leaping over vehicles or fighting in the water. 

The final leap that Max makes out to the moving hook was complicated. It involved a winch moving the hook across the screen at a set rate, timed to Tom’s leap for it, timed with the War Boys’ arrival just as Max has leaped out of their reach. Tom did it all.“

 (X)

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