Many franchise fans have wondered why Mad Max doesn’t age, but one fan theory offers the answer that the hero of the sci-fi series is actually immortal. Beginning in 1979 with the raw, grounded revenge thriller Mad Max, veteran Aussie director George Miller’s Mad Max movies have cycled through numerous different tones and styles since Mel Gibson first played the title role in the surprise sleeper hit all those years ago.
Where the first film in the Mad Max series was a relatively realistic action thriller that saw Gibson’s cop attempt to salvage his city’s crumbling society, the first Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior dropped viewers into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and offered no semblance of an explanation for the end of the world that seemingly occurred between franchise installments. From there, Beyond Thunderdome offered an even more out-there vision of life after the end of the world, while 2015’s return-to-form Fury Road was an intense chase movie set between Mad Max and The Road Warrior. Between the four films, viewers still learned little about the title character, but one fan theory posits that this choice could be intentional.
The timeline of the Mad Max series begins with the first film, which is followed by Fury Road, then leads into The Road Warrior before ending with the events of Beyond Thunderdome. The continuity is confusing, to say the least, with Max himself being played by a young Mel Gibson in the first film, an older Tom Hardy in Fury Road, and then Gibson again in The Road Warrior. But the question of how Max has survived his many wasteland adventures becomes a lot clearer if the character is intended to be a secretly immortal wanderer doomed to adventure across the wasteland for all eternity. It’s a surreal twist even for this far-fetched sci-fi series, but this Mad Max fan theory is also an idea that becomes surprisingly believable when interrogated alongside the evidence provided in the franchise’s movies.
Mad Max’s Changing Age
In Mad Max, viewers can reasonably guess that Max is under 30, as the character is established early on in the movie as a young cop with a wife and kids. His actor Mel Gibson was a mere 23 during filming but, young as Max is in the first film, it’s unlikely that the cop is intended to be barely out of school and already married. As such, it’s reasonable to suggest he’s at least 25 or older. However, by the time the story of Fury Road takes place (with the 2015 movie canonically being the next movie in the timeline), Max and the Many Mothers are the only characters who recall electricity and television. Now, while Max looks to be in his 30s in Fury Road (with a youthful-looking Hardy being 38 during filming), the Many Mothers are clearly intended to be at least a generation older than Furiosa. Furiosa is in her late 20s or early 30s, so is Hardy’s seemingly 30-something Max actually a full generation older than her, and closer in age to Immortan Joe than his co-star?
Furiosa’s Age And Fury Road’s History
In Fury Road, heroine Furiosa says she was captured by Immortan Joe at 12, which viewers can reasonably guess was at least 15 years ago, as the character can scarcely be younger than 27 at the youngest. But if she was a member of the Many Mothers tribe from birth, at least one generation of children have been born and segregated into boys and girls by the tribe since society’s collapse, since the Many Mothers presumably didn’t exist as a tribe since before the unseen Mad Max apocalypse. This detail adds at least 20 years on top of Furiosa’s minimum 15 years of servitude under Immortan Joe’s totalitarian rule, further affirming that Max is a full generation older than Furiosa, despite appearing to be the same age as her. To clarify, viewers can deduce that it has been at least 35 years since Max was a rookie cop, and Tom Hardy’s Max looks only a little older than Gibson in the first film as opposed to the 50 he should be (at minimum). His appearance is also important, since…
Mad Max Does Age (Despite His Immortality)
In Beyond Thunderdome, Max is going grey at the temples, which is quite an achievement when the script notes that it’s been 15 years since the events of The Road Warrior. It’s clear, judging by the fact that the movie attempted to make Gibson look older than the 33 years he was at the time of filming, that Beyond Thunderdome is intentionally depicting an older Max. However, even if The Road Warrior takes place immediately after Fury Road, Max is still somewhere between (at the youngest) 65 and at the oldest 80-something (if viewers add another Fury Road-to-The Road Warrior gap between The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome). Despite this fact, Max still somehow looks more like a greying 30 than an octogenarian.
Why The Theory Might Not Be True
When recasting the character for Fury Road, director George Miller and company played into the idea that Max may be more legend than man, and therefore Hardy’s character could be a different person. Furthermore, even the immortality theory doesn’t justify how Mel Gibson became Tom Hardy before turning back into Mel Gibson between the original Mad Max, Fury Road, and The Road Warrior, so the character still has an unexplained ability to switch faces between movies even if he is an undying mythical figure.
How This Theory Affects The Wasteland
If Mad Max franchise mastermind George Miller’s upcoming fifth movie The Wasteland hopes to finally depict how the apocalypse happened in the franchise’s enigmatic universe, recasting Max or casting a visibly older Hardy can be justified by explaining that the character is actually immortal (which also explains how a beat cop survived the end of the world despite already being on the brink of a breakdown at the end of the original Mad Max). However, explicitly confirming this fan theory would mean adding some more overt fantasy elements to the Mad Max movies’ already chaotic genre mish-mash, complicating a franchise that currently draws from sci-fi movies, action cinema, thrillers, and adventure films alike.
