Tom Hardy was no brainer for Mad Max

George Miller chose Tom Hardy to play Mad Max because of his "charisma".

The Australian filmmaker helms the action franchise and is currently working on the fourth instalment, Fury Road, which is due out next year. The title role was originally held by Mel Gibson and he was last seen in 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. For the next movie, George wanted to find a star whose presence was resonant of that of Mel's.

"I suppose the closet analogy is James Bond. It's essentially the same character, but it's Tom's interpretation of it. Clearly, Tom and Mel have a lot in common as actors and as people," George explained to Empire magazine.

"Tom was the one actor who walked through the door who reminded me of Mel when he walked through the door all those years ago. Charisma is a very difficult thing to define, but they're both very sweet men, but also very dangerous, so you get that paradox. They're both very lovable but very dangerous. That's precisely what Max is."

The movie boasts an A-list cast alongside Tom, including Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Charlize Theron, who plays Imperator Furiosa. Casting for this particular role was clear for George and he had no other actress in mind

"Again, like Tom felt to me like Max, when we devised the character of Furiosa, the one actor who immediately felt like her was Charlize," he added. "There's a power to her. I'm not aware of other female characters in storytelling, whether it be cinema or anything else, who are quite like her. That's who Max encounters in this story, that's the principal character. He gets caught up in her dilemma."