Furiosa’s Tom Burke: ‘I felt much more intimidated on Mad Max than I let myself admit’

The star of ‘Strike’ and ‘The Souvenir’ talks to Patrick Smith about culture wars, JK Rowling, on-set disputes, the time a TV channel shattered his confidence and how he copes with being considered for Bond. Back in his twenties, Tom Burke was told by a British TV channel that his face didn’t fit. Literally. The actor, who had reconstructive surgery as a boy before winning a place at Rada, was close to a part in an “iconic period drama”, he remembers. “I very nearly got cast,” he tells me, “but I got told I didn’t have the right face for that channel. And I didn’t know if it was my cleft lip, or what it was.”.

The star of Strike and The Souvenir doesn’t want to say which channel, for obvious reasons, but the remark shattered his confidence. Today, Burke admits he is “very pleased” to have become something of a pin-up. In the flesh, the 42-year-old has a kind of rumpled handsomeness, his hair and beard flecked with the odd hint of grey. Around his wrist is a beaded bracelet he fiddles with; a red necklace dangles between the lapels of his French worker jacket. Far from the lugubrious men he often inhabits on screen, he’s smiling and funny. There’s something, too, in the way that he edits as he speaks, often letting sentences trail off before languorously reconstructing them to say pretty much the same thing. He can shift gear quickly, though, to be impassioned and direct.

We’re here, in his publicist’s offices in Fulham, to discuss his new film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. George Miller’s prequel to his 2015 franchise reboot Fury Road is the summer’s most keenly awaited blockbuster, a cacophonous, nerve-fraying symphony of savagery. Careening through this orchestrated mayhem – which unfolds in a vast, post-apocalyptic Australasian wilderness – is Anya Taylor-Joy, delivering a fierce performance as the younger Furiosa, the hard-bitten, one-armed badass played by Charlize Theron in the previous film. Brooding opposite her is Burke, head to toe in battered leather. As Praetorian Jack, a stoic, sharp-shooting convoy driver helping Furiosa to exact revenge on the warlord (Chris Hemsworth) who murdered her mother, he is impressively understated, if underused. In a film that wrestles with grief and loss, it’s the quasi-romance between Jack and Furiosa that really lends the plot its emotional heft.

The part came at him with little notice. When Burke heard that Miller wanted a video meeting, the actor, still to see a script, automatically assumed the role would be yet another, in his words, “wrong ’un”. “I’ve played a few in my time,” he explains, “and I was thinking, OK, it’s set in the Mad Max world, so the part’s obviously going to be some sort of lascivious, horrible person. To my great relief, it wasn’t, because there’s only so much you want to do back-to-back before it wears on your soul a little.”.

Just as the role was new cinematic ground for Burke, so, too, was the movie itself. Receiving five-star raves and a seven-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere, the film is distinctive not only for its oil-slick, full-throttle set pieces, but for the richness of its world-building. “I’d never been on anything that scale,” says Burke, citing David Fincher’s Mank as the biggest movie he’d done previously. “For that reason, I felt much more intimidated than I let myself admit. But I’ve probably felt that to some degree on every job I’ve ever done.”.

Miller’s is a toxic, nihilistic world of (mostly) male violence. “I believe it’s in all of us to get nasty when we feel cornered,” says Burke. “I think that’s when things turn, and I think that’s the great challenge of being on the Earth, really – to try and know when that [nastiness] is coming out of survival instinct.” Don’t trust your primal instincts in tense situations seems to be his message here.

I don’t want to discredit the film Donkey Punch as I know it has a following. I did regret it. I don’t know why – it just didn’t sit well with me. Those instincts were given full rein on the sweltering desert set of Fury Road, where, in an atmosphere that became fraught and chaotic, Theron and Tom Hardy clashed repeatedly. Burke says that all of the cast of the new film were aware there had been issues. “We’d seen that movie,” he explains. “I can imagine, if you were in the midst of that, you might have been going, ‘What’s going on?’” But he insists, on the new film, with “stuff going on all around, we felt very free to abandon ourselves to it”.

That’s not quite how Taylor-Joy described it to The New York Times recently, when she said she had “never been more alone than when making that movie”, and that “everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard”, promising to reveal all at a later date. Mad Max, it seems, carries some of its madness within it. While on the subject of on-set difficulties, Burke talks about the “instances in my career, earlier on, where I brought heat and noise to a situation. It’s tricky, sometimes, when things get very frantic,” he says. “I didn’t want to carry on being that actor; quite apart from not wanting to burn bridges, it’s not the energy I want to bring to a party.”.