It’s been almost 30 years since Mel Gibson last stepped into the role of Mad Max in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, so it’s honestly surprising that a Hollywood reboot of the post-apocalyptic action franchise took this long to come around. Next summer, The Dark Knight Rises actor Tom Hardy will step into the iconic role for Mad Max: Fury Road, a remake that finds the character fleeing across the Wasteland (a devastated Australia) with a group of people in a vehicle called a War Rig, driven by the Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron).
That plot begs more questions than it answers, and our second look at Hardy in full uniform (above), like the first snap we got of the actor in character, doesn’t do anything to clarify story details. A slightly extended synopsis that’s been making the rounds online just further impresses the fact that newcomers to the franchise will have a lot of story to absorb very quickly:
“Mad Max is caught up with a group of people fleeing across the Wasteland in a War Rig driven by the Imperator Furiosa. This movie is an account of the Road War which follows. It is based on the Word Burgers of the History Men and eyewitness accounts of those who survived.”
In the film, Max finds himself tasked with protecting a group of women known collectively as The Wives, including Toast (Zoë Kravitz), Capable (Riley Keough), The Dag (Abbey Lee Kershaw), Fragile (Courtney Eaton), and Splendid (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). Co-starring are Nicholas Hoult as Nux, Hugh Keays-Byrne as Immortan Joe, and Nathan Jones as Rictus Erectus. Who any of those characters are is currently unknown, but that’s a highly talented supporting cast, which just makes me more excited to see what writer-director George Miller (who helmed the previous Mad Max films) and his co-writers Nick Lathouris and Brendan McCarthy have up their sleeves in this return to the series.
Mad Max: Fury Road arrives in 3D on May 15, 2015.
