Fury Road’s Original Nude Mad Max Reveal Was Perfect
The earliest drafts of Mad Max: Fury Road introduced the titular hero in the nude, and the sequence deserved to remain in the finished movie for numerous reasons. In 2015's Fury Road, Tom Hardy’s Mad Max got a pretty great introduction. First seen biting the head off a lizard before being chased across the desert by raving War Boys, Max is as disheveled as ever and as taciturn as always.
However, a much earlier draft of the sequel gave the character a fitting introduction that would have been even better. According to Kyle Buchanan’s 2022 book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, writer Eric Blakeney had an idea for how to introduce Max when he was working on the earliest drafts of the sequel’s script. Blakeney’s intro eventually got scrapped, but it was perfectly fitted to Fury Road’s themes.
Related: Mad Max: Tom Hardy & Charlize Theron's Fury Road Feud Explained
In the first draft of Fury Road, Max’s earliest onscreen appearance came when one of the War Boys went looking for a blood bag. Fury Road’s Mad Max was written for Mel Gibson originally and this introductory scene would have played up the actor’s then-famous sex appeal. As Nux picked a nude man from the line of prisoners dangling in front of him, the camera would then pan across his naked rear end before turning him around and revealing it was Gibson’s Max. Per Blakeney, the idea came about when he was arguing to keep Gibson as the lead.
The writer said: “I came up with this sequence for how we could reintroduce him… we go down to the basement where all the War Boys are begging for bleeds [and] the bleeders are hanging from their ankles like meat, upside down naked… So, they agree to give Nux a bleed, and they wheel this ass in
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