Kat Dennings Auditioned for Mad Max with Tom Hardy for Six Hours. Afterward He Drove Her Home, and When She Woke Up from a Nap, He Was Still Having Tea with Her Mom
by Nicole Stawiarski · Thought CatalogUpdated 53 minutes ago, September 16, 2026
Dennings took to TikTok to share her own Mad Max audition after seeing Michael Fassbender describe his. It was a chemistry read, which she explained is when “they will pair two actors that are both testing for roles together to kind of co audition.” She drew Tom Hardy, who got the role. The whole thing ran six hours.
“Basically what happened was an acting class if it was the worst day of your life,” she said. George Miller sat in but “didn’t say much”; an acting coach ran most of it, and “the dialogue was a couple of pages and kind of vague.” At one point “they had us switch roles” and filmed them running around a corner.
The worst part, she said, was when the coach told them “to say the lines without saying the lines, encouraging us to just make noises instead of the lines.” “I was dying,” she said. Hardy, on the other hand, “really took to this exercise. Like, he was able to be extremely free and come up with very creative ways of doing these lines.” They broke for lunch in the middle.
She didn’t have a car yet, and her plan was to walk to the corner and call a cab or get her mom. Hardy heard and said, “Oh, I’ll just take you home.” Her read: “we just spent six hours together and you seem very nice, so let’s do it.”
Dennings still lived at home with her parents. Hardy came inside, met her mom, said “oh, what a nice house,” and her mom waved him in. “Alright, Tom, well, this is a very special day,” Dennings remembered thinking. “I hope you move further in this experience, cause I know that I’m not going to.”
She went back to the converted garage where she lived, put her pajamas on, and took a nap. “Few hours later, go back into the main house, and Tom Hardy is still there, having tea with my mother and just chatting it up.”
“My mom still talks about him,” she said.
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