Shortly after Mad Max: Fury Road came out, a fan theory began to circulate online. Tom Hardy's Max wasn't really Max at all – as in Max Rockatansky, the character portrayed by Mel Gibson in the three previous movies.

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Rockatansky gives The Feral Kid a wind-up music box, which is similar to the one we see Hardy's Max have in his possession (it's found by one of Immortan Joe's wives as she pokes about the War Rig).

Hardy's Max doesn't identify himself until the very end of the move, and even then, his introduction – "Max. My name is Max. That's my name." – feels off, strange, as if it's the first time he's uttered those words

Max is for the majority of Fury Road a dumb character, uttering very few words and mainly communicating through grunts.

“ You interpret the story according to the way you see the world.

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If you're unfamiliar with the speculation, it posits that Hardy's Max is actually 'The Feral Kid' from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior; he's grown-up and inherited Max's leather jacket and V8 Interceptor. And there's definitely plenty of evidence to support this reading:So we put the theory to Miller, and here's what the Mad Max creator and director had to say:"That’s great… No, unfortunately but that’s a great idea. Only because at the end of Mad Max 2, it turns out the narrator is the Feral Kid as an old man, and he says, ‘He only lives now in my memories.’”At this point we informed Miller the theory ingeniously factors in the end of Mad Max 2, since the events of Fury Road take place on the Feral Kid's journey to becoming a tribal leader and the narrator of Mad Max 2."There are resonances we see: there is always a dominance hierarchy with a tyrannical leader, like Immortal Joe; there’s always a struggle for resources; the few controlling the many. And all those sort of things. You interpret the story according to the way you see the world. That’s what we do n songs, in poetry – that famous story in of some guy who figured out what Freddie Mercury and the guys were doing with Bohemian Rhapsody; he had this theory, and Freddie Mercury said, ‘If you see it, dear – it’s there’.“And I think that’s [the Fury Road fan theory] a reasonable interpretation, but not in my mind.”Of course, there's plenty of evidence against this reading too, but it's fun to know Miller is happy for it to be in circulation.While he was at IGN, Miller also told us the secret origin story of the Doof Warrior (aka Immortan Joe's guitarist whose guitar doubles up as a flamethrower). You can find out all about that in the video below:

Daniel is IGN's Games Editor over in London. He writes about movies, too. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter