Pre-stardom Jennifer Lawrence and Margot Robbie were among the hundreds of women who auditioned for Immortan Joe’s wives in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Jennifer Lawrence and Margot Robbie once auditioned to play Immortan Joe’s wives in Mad Max: Fury Road. The film from director George Miller was the fourth and most recent entry in the dystopian Mad Max franchise, which began with 1979’s low-budget original that became one of the most profitable movies ever made. Mad Max: Fury Road released in 2015, thirty years after its franchise predecessor, and was met with tremendous critical acclaim.
Though Miller first conceived the project in the 1980s, Fury Road had a legendarily difficult time getting made, spending decades in development hell. The film was at one point set to begin filming in 2001, only for the economic impact of 9/11 to suddenly make it prohibitively expensive, and another attempt in 2003 was foiled by both rainfall and the onset of the Iraq War. The production finally came together in the 2010s, and the result was what many have hailed as one of the greatest action movies of all time, winning six Academy Awards across the crafts categories.
A new book to release soon, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan, chronicles this difficult creative process, and an excerpt shared by Vulture reveals a number of alternative casting options from over the years. Among them, Buchanan writes, are Hollywood stars Lawrence and Robbie, who were two of the hundreds of women the casting department met with to play one of the fleeing wives of the film’s villainous cult leader. The search began in 2009, meaning that they likely auditioned before their respective breakout performances in 2010’s Winter’s Bone and 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
Lawrence and Robbie are on a long list of famous figures to have almost been in Fury Road, some of which are a product of its lengthy development period. At one point, Miller considered Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie for the lead roles – before they became Hollywood’s most famous power-couple. Additionally, the Australian filmmaker was impressed enough with 8 Mile to meet with Eminem about playing Mad Max, noting that, had the movie been shot domestically, the rapper probably would’ve been up for it.
While it’s surely tantalizing to imagine all these famous names in the high-octane world of Mad Max: Fury Road, fans of the film can hardly regret the way things turned out. Charlize Theron as co-protagonist Imperator Furiosa, in particular, stands out as one of the great action-movie performances, spurring the Oscar-winner to continue pursuing similar projects. Prospective viewers can only hope that Miller’s planned follow-up, a Furiosa prequel starring Anya Taylor-Joy, doesn’t take another 30 years to make it to the big screen.
Source: Blood, Sweat & Chrome (via Vulture)
- Furiosa (2023)Release date: Jun 23, 2023
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