Getty Image/Warner Bros.
- Mad Max: Fury Road famously took decades to make its way to the big screen.
- As a result, many actors were considered for the titular role of Max Rockatansky.
- Prior to his death, the great Heath Ledger was virtually in pole position for the role.
While Mad Max: Fury Road wound up being the perfect action movie, its famed production process was anything but as it took the film literal decades to finally hit the big screen.
Taking on various forms — for a time in the 90s, there were talks to make it a TV show — and landing at multiple studios, the gestation period of Mad Max: Fury Road was so incredibly arduous that there was enough of a story to write a book about it: the recently released Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road.
As a huge Fury Road fan, I’ve been making my way through Blood, Sweat & Chrome and have been fascinated by the years-long process of taking an idea from the depths of someone’s mind and turning it into a historic $154 million dollar movie.
Of all of the tidbits packed into the book, the ones I’ve found most interesting are the one about who director George Miller was considering for the role of Max Rockatansky when it became clear that previous star Mel Gibson was both too old and too controversial to continuing leading the franchise. For example, in the early 2000s when the film — then at Universal Picturesprior to its eventual home of Warner Bros. — was being storyboarded, Brad Pitt’s face was used in some of the frames.
“George asked me, because I’d worked with them, ‘What do you think about Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp?'” said Erik Blakney, a writer on the film.
Then, as the years went by (and after Mel Gibson became persona non grata in Hollywood following his anti-semitic remarks in 2006), Miller became fixated on the idea of giving the role to a fellow Aussie: the late, great Heath Ledger.
“For a long time, Heath Ledger was in the picture,” says Belinda Johns, who was an assistant for director George Miller.
“The person who was foremost in my mind was Heath [Ledger],” Miller said of recasting the role of Max Rockatansky for Fury Road. “Every time he’d come through Sydney, he’d pop in and we’d talk generally about things, and then we started to talk about Mad Max. We lost him, which was such a pity — not for Mad Max but because he was an exceptional person. He had a very powerful sense of inquiry and was amazingly humble.”
Just 28-years-old at the time of his tragic passing, Ledger’s death remains one of the great “what ifs?” in the history of Hollywood as the late Australian actor was likely on the verge of a truly historic career
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road is now available to purchase.
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