Hugh Keays-Byrne is bad to the ‘Max’
At 68, Hugh Keays-Byrne is this summer’s most unlikely movie villain.
As the vicious biker-gang leader Toecutter, he made Mel Gibson’s life miserable in George Miller’s 1979 action flick Mad Max. And he’s at it again as the masked warlord Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road, which took in $44 million its opening weekend.
It’s all trippy for the India-born former member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, who settled into an acting career in Australia in the 1970s. “I don’t think you think about things like this. It seems a bit big,” he says.
The Immortan rules over the post-apocalyptic Wasteland with an iron fist, and that includes his personal life. He has taken a number of women to be his brides and mothers to future zealots, yet rebellion shows up at his doorstep when Max (Tom Hardy) teams with one of the Immortan’s crew, Furiosa (Charlize Theron), to drive the women to safety.
“For an old ham like me,” being a villain is “great fun,” the actor says. “I tend to always be the bad guys. I’m yearning to play a lover.”
On set, Keays-Byrne playfully demanded that everyone call him “Daddy.” But his place in Max mythology also gave him respect: Nathan Jones, who plays the Immortan’s son Rictus Erectus, saw him as Toecutter at age 9. “He scared the hell out of me,” Jones says. “And now he’s my dad.”
Miller signed Keays-Byrne and a group of fellow stage actors to play Toecutter and his gang in the original movie but couldn’t afford to fly them from Sydney to Melbourne. So he sent them motorcycles via train, and they rode down, becoming a tight group.
“When I think about it now, I just shudder: The Toecutter’s ax was stashed in the framework” of that not-quite-street-legal bike, says Keays-Byrne. “If that slipped? Pretty scary.”
The meanest weapon KeaysByrne wields these days is a hoe. He takes the odd job if he feels like it (“I’ve always been a lazy actor”), but for him, a lovely day involves painting or gardening.
“I love sitting around chatting about rubbish. It’s all good.”