This week sadly saw the loss of one of the most significant figures from the Mad Max community, Hugh Keays-Byrne who passed away at the age of 73. His depiction of the biker gang leader, Toecutter, gave the first Mad Max a hefty boon in finding its audience and attraction around the world thanks to the convincing manic brutality and psychotic charisma that Keays-Byrne invested his anti-establishment character with. He returned to the series again for Mad Max Fury Road, this time playing the Warlord Immortan Joe. In this role Keays-Byrne brought to the screen one of cinema's most iconic villains and helped introduce a new generation to the world of Mad Max. He also appeared in many other movies appreciated by readers of this blog. Among those are the 1974 biker movie Stone, The Chain Reaction (1980) featuring savage car chases supervised by George Miller, Lorca and the Outlaws(1984) as the mercenary Danny in the troubled Roger Christian sci-fi movie and the post-apocalyptic sporting bloodbath Salute of the Jugger (1989). In 1992 he co-directed and appeared in the dystopian movie Resistance. He also found genre roles in TV productions such as Badlands 2005. He played the wanderer Moondance in this 1988 pilot that was very much Mad Max in tone, (directed by a different George Miller) and was lensed in the same location as Mad Max 2 out in Broken Hill, NSW. Keays-Byrne also had a recurring role as the character Grunchlk in Farscape.
Perhaps the best person to convey what Hugh meant to the Mad Max universe is George Miller which he did in this interview with Zack Sharf over at Indiewire.com after Keays-Byrne had passed. https://www.indiewire.com/2020/12/george-miller-honors-mad-max-actor-hugh-keays-byrne-dead-73-1234601980/
No comments:
Post a Comment