"Mad Max: Fury Road" is coming, and coming very, very hard. With a Cannes Film Festival screening scheduled, six minutes set to unspool in front of "Furious 7" screenings in the U.K., and buzz building, thanks to the absolutely insane new trailer, Warner Bros. is banking big on the George Miller movie. In fact, they already have Tom Hardy signed up for more.
In a new interview with Esquire, the actor reveals he’s contracted for three more "Mad Max" films — provided ‘Fury Road’ gets both the box office and critical reception everyone is hoping for. And if you think this is just talk, Miller has actually laid down a lot of groundwork for where he wants the story to go next. “In order to tell this story, we came up with two others. We’ve written the screenplay of one and the novelization of another, but it’s a very rough novel,” the director said last summer. “We kept working on them while we were working on other things.” It should also be noted that at one point, the plan was to shoot two features that would shoot back to back — ‘Fury Road’ and "Mad Max: Furiosa." That didn’t happen, but clearly Miller has been thinking beyond this movie.
READ MORE: George Miller Says ‘Fury Road’ Just The Start Of A Potential New Mad Max Trilogy
As for ‘Fury Road,’ Hardy is already feeling the weight of carrying his first major blockbuster — one in which he estimates he only has between four and twenty lines of dialogue. “I’ve never been more excited and out of my comfort zone,” he says. And yes, he’s seen the movie and it’s “fucking unbelievable.” Right on. But that final effort wasn’t without a difficult shoot.
“We were in the middle of nowhere, so far away from the studio system that [Warner Bros] can’t really see what’s going on, and just getting things to and from the set was a nightmare. We’d lose half a vehicle in sand and have to dig it out. It was just this unit in the middle of x-million square-kilometres of desert, and then this group of lunatics in leathers, like a really weird S&M party, or a Hell’s Angels convention," he says. "It was like Cirque du Soleil meets fucking Slipknot.”
And as for his rumored battles with Charlize Theron on set, he plays it down, while admitting he could be part of the problem. “I have a reputation for being difficult. And I am. I am actually. But I’m not unreasonable. It used to be that if somebody hurt me I’d lash out a bit, in order to get them to stop," Hardy explains. "It ultimately comes from fear. If I cause enough of a mess, then people will never ask me again to do something I don’t want to do. But that sort of backfires after a while so you don’t want to do that. You grow up.”
And soon, we could see Hardy growing up into the next big screen, franchise hero. "Mad Max: Fury Road" arrives on May 15th.