Spitting At Armie Hammer Is Reportedly What Landed Tom Hardy The Lead In ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

If you’ve ever felt an overwhelming desire to spit in the face of disgraced movie star Armie Hammer, know that Tom Hardy has already done it—and was handsomely rewarded for his efforts.

Vulture ran an excerpt from Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, a forthcoming book by Kyle Buchanan (a former editor for the site, who’s now with The New York Times), which talked about the casting process for the Oscar-winning 2015 movie, the latest in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Mad Max series. According to casting director Ronna Kress, the search for the “new” Max Rockatansky took an entire year and “We saw, at the time, what I consider now to be many of the movie stars of our day.”

Alongside Hardy and Hammer, Michael Fassbender and Jeremy Renner were among the top contenders for the part—and eventually the team wanted to see the actors alongside each other. Which is how Hardy and Hammer ended up in a room together, and Hammer essentially called mercy. “When Hardy gnashed his teeth and spat at his scene partner, Hammer told Miller that Hardy needed to be Max more than he did,” Buchanan writes.

“After Tom auditioned, George [Miller] and I went into another room, and we had a long moment of quiet with each other,” Kress said. “Then I said to George, ‘Is this the person that you can spend nine months in the desert with, telling this story Is this the person that’s right for you’”

For Miller, it was like a bit of déjà vu. “I had the same feeling about Tom that I had when Mel Gibson first walked into the room,” Miller said. “There was a kind of edgy charm, the charisma of animals. You don’t know what’s going on in their inner depths, and yet they’re enormously attractive.”

Miller was sold—though not, according to Hardy, before “he checked my background with other directors to see what it was like to work with me.”

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road is set to be published on February 22, 2022.