Are journalists stirring the pot for no reason? Recently, in a red carpet interview for Paramount+’s new organized crime family drama “Mobland,” star Tom Hardy (“Venom”) was asked about more “Mad Max” with the suggestion that more ‘Max’ could secretly be shooting in Australia this year. Playfully, Hardy told the journo he wouldn’t tell them anything even if there was something to tell, which people still took to mean something, but it just doesn’t seem to be a thing.
Hardy joined our Bingewortthy TV Podcast this week to speak about the excellent crime drama, “MobLand,” wherein Hardy plays a fixer for an elite London crime family; when asked about this or the possibility of more ‘Mad Max’ films, Hardy sounded unsure—likely since 2023’s “Mad Max: Furiosa” stumbled hard at the box office last year, failing to hit $175 million even worldwide.
“I don’t know how possible it is,” Hardy said skeptically about the likelihood of more ‘Mad Max’ films that he might star in.
Still, he remembers the film fondly, including working with filmmaker George Miller.
“That was my first experience of anything like that, in the aspect of that amount of action,” Hardy said about the notoriously grueling shoot in Australia in 2013. “And that set me up really well for the rest of my career in that [regard] to go, ‘Okay, that’s how it’s done.’”
“So nothing’s phased me since then because that was like basic training, but it wasn’t basic at all,” he continued. “That [experience] was a rocket. Getting me back [to more ‘Max’] wouldn’t take much. I’d be happy to go.”
Of course, Hardy famously had a small cameo in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” that did not make the theatrical cut but surfaced as a deleted scene. In it, Hardy is incognito as a Storm Trooper who interacts with John Boyega’s Finn character. But was that enough to scratch his itch from a galaxy far, far away?
“I love Star Wars. My favorite character is Han Solo. No, I’d be well up for doing more ‘Star Wars,’” he said.
“That was great. I’ve always wanted to be in a ‘Star Wars’ film,” he continued. So playing a stormtrooper was fantastic.”
While his face was not seen on screen, Hardy’s character had a noticeably Southern accent, and he says that choice was a homage to his character in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant.”
“And I took Fitzgerald from ‘The Revenant’ and put him in the stormtrooper outfit,” he explained. “Yeah, I wanted to give a little bit of a nod to Alejandro.”
You hear that one Kathleen Kennedy, maybe before you hand off the reigns? Tom Hardy would love to be in a Star War. –Additional reporting by Mike DeAngelo.
