‘Mad Max’ Actor Hugh Keays-Byrne Dies at 73
Open the gates of Valhalla for this one. Australian film icon Hugh Keays-Byrne has passed away at the age of 73.
Hugh was born in India to a British family and lived there briefly before moving to England, where he began acting in his early 20s. He first came to Australia while touring with the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Liking Australia so much, he decided to stay while the tour moved on, and soon became a movie star best known for his roles as rebels and outlaws, such as his film debut in the 1974 biker drama Stone, which was a key inspiration for Mad Max. However it is his roles as the main villain in both 1979’s Mad Max and 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road for which he is best remembered.
In Mad Max he played the Toecutter, the psychopathic leader of a violent gang of bikers, a role he received thanks to his performance and motorcycle riding ability displayed in Stone. While Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky represented the last vestiges of law, order, and civilization in a post-apocalyptic world, Toecutter and his gang were a new breed of savages who embraced the chaotic new order of things. Toecutter was the perfect 1970s villain: a tornado of chaos that destroyed everything he came across. Hugh’s complex and nuanced performance did a lot of heavy lifting, imbuing the character with many dualistic qualities in order to highlight his chaotic nature and contrast him with Max’s representation of order and civility. Toecutter is wise yet childlike, pragmatic yet reckless, and full of both love and hate. Each of these qualities is balanced carefully by Hugh’s expert performance to create a compelling and memorable villain.
In Mad Max: Fury Road, he plays a very different type of villain in the fading dictator Immortan Joe. Joe is an old man, growing weak and ill in a society of his own making that values strength and power above all else. Hugh’s performance again required him to portray another type of dualistic character. Joe’s body is slowly falling apart and he is dying of various radiation-borne illnesses, yet he must project strength and inspire both awe and fear in his soldiers and subjects (and the audience) in order to maintain control of his dominion. Hugh was able to walk this tightrope to perfection, through a mask no less, and in doing so brought to life one of the most memorable screen villains in recent years. His role in Fury Road is also of special importance to us at Under the Wheels, as several of his notable lines and phrases from the film form the basis of our rating system.
Another interesting footnote about Hugh Keays-Byrne is that he was cast as the Martian Manhunter in Mad Max director George Miller‘s unmade Justice League film that was being discussed in the early 2000s. It’s unfortunate that the movie never came together, as a superhero film directed by one of the greatest action filmmakers of all time would have been a must-watch, and it would have been another opportunity to put a dynamic performer like Hugh Keays-Byrne in front of American audiences. While it never came to pass, we still have his existing body of work to look back on and enjoy.
