How A Fight With A Rugby Team Helped Get Mel Gibson Into Mad Max
Hollywood is littered with unlikely casting stories. It has become less and less common for unknown actors to break out in starring movie roles these days since those are mostly going to established names. If you want to break in, you pretty much gotta make your name on a TV or streaming series first, but when you do hear about these iconic roles, most of the time there's a good story behind how these stars landed their breakout part.
There's Johnny Depp driving his friend to the audition for this little horror movie called "A Nightmare on Elm Street" where he ended up reading for and getting the part of the final girl's boyfriend, or how Ke Huy Quan was found by Spielberg for "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when the crew was combing Los Angeles-area schools for kids right for the part and even then they first auditioned Quan's brother.
For decades Mel Gibson's trademark character was Max Rockatansky. The tough-guy Australian actor seemed to be born to play the part, but you have to remember that Gibson wasn't a known actor when the 1979 original was produced. Turns out his casting story is just as weird as the ones listed above.
It wasn't Gibson who was first called in to audition, it was his friend. He drove his friend to the audition, but caught the casting director's eye ... because he was beaten to a bloody pulp.
'We need freaks in this film'
As he describes in the interview above, completed for Scream Factory's release of "Mad Max," Gibson had gotten into a brawl the weekend before. As he tells the story, he decided to pick a fight with half a Rugby team, and "it didn't work out too well on my end."
Gibson said he didn't look very pretty, but that roughneck type of brawler is just who they were looking for, so the casting office women took some pictures of him and asked him to come back when he healed up a bit. He did and they were surprised that he was a handsome guy when all the swelling and bruising went away.
Ultimately, he ended up in front of director George Miller and got the part after being asked to memorize a couple of pages of dialogue. It's ironic because Max became known as a man of few words, but if you go back and watch that first movie, you'll see he has way more to say than the post-apocalyptic version of the character would in the later films.
So, if Gibson hadn't gotten into a fight with half of a Rugby team (and lost) we never would have gotten "Mad Max" as we know him today. There will be plenty who will argue that might be a good thing, but it's undeniable that these movies are high-octane weirdo masterpieces. Despite what anyone's feelings are on Gibson today, it's hard not to begrudgingly acknowledge that we don't get the masterpiece that is "Mad Max: Fury Road" without Gibson getting his ass beat by some Rugby blowhards.