Want to know what it’s like to go live in the desert for six months and play Soundgarden on a flame-throwing guitar made of bedpans? God bless Vice, now you can.
In an interview that answered all of my burning questions about the flame-shooting, long john-wearing guitarist in Fury Road, Australian actor/performer/painter Sean Hape (he’s previously played Hedwig in live productions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) talked to Vice about what it was like to shred as “Doof Warrior.”
The Andrew W.K. of water wars on how he got the Mad Max gig:
Just through my agency at the time. We knew Mad Max was possibly filming and I was very keen to just do anything to be a part of it. The role just turned up and they asked if I wanted to try it out. Of course I jumped at it. They gave me a brief that the character was somewhere between Keith Richards and a scarecrow.
[…] There were leather pants, there were all these belts I put on and I had feathers on my shoulders and a black leather gimp mask turned backwards on my head. I had my eyes blacked out, brown on my teeth, my nails were blacked. I had chains and jewelry and stuff all over me. I thought I looked the part so I just went, “Hey guys, this is mine, give it to me.” [Laughs]
On set life:
You’d be picked up at three or four in the morning and driven an hour and a half or two hours into the desert, get to base camp, get your kit on, eat breakfast, and then get up onto the truck. They’d strap me in and I’d just sort of be there for eight hours.
Yes, I was up on the truck and we were tearing through the desert and I had bungies on my hips and the guitar had bungies on it as well because it weighs about 60 kilos (132 pounds). It’s impossible to hold up. I wasn’t blind until the mask comes off at the end of the film and I had a prosthetic on for that so I was kind of led around by the hands for a day or two.
[…] In that situation, I don’t think there’s a lot of direction that you need. It’s one of the craziest situations you could ever find yourself in. There’s cars tearing all around you with dust and smoke, it’s very loud. I was just screaming my head off and being kind of like an animal, I guess. The character is supposed to be a really great musician who is a bit mute and a bit deaf, and quite blind. I think of him as sort of a Quasimodo-like character.
[…] the guitar wasn’t… it wasn’t a great guitar. It spent a lot of time out in the desert, you wouldn’t want to record with it. Most of the time, I’d just try to make noise. I pulled out some AC/DC, some Soundgarden, some Zeppelin, but after eight hours, you do just start thumping on it for a while.
Hape told Vice that he’d love to return as Doof for any future Mad Max films, and he might be in luck–Miller has confirmed on the The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast that the follow-up screenplay Mad Max: The Wasteland has already been completed. Miller didn’t explicitly say that Wasteland would feature a post-apocalyptic Riot grrrl band fronted by Furiosa and occasionally backed up by Doof, but here’s hoping.
(via Consequence of Sound and Boing Boing, image via Tumblr)
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