He started out with the RSC in 1968 and appeared in productions including As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing. Keays-Byrne also was reportedly on board to play the Martian Manhunter in Miller’s Justice League film that was set for a 2009 release but abandoned.īorn on May 18, 1947, Keays-Byrne and his family moved to Britain when he was young. I thought I had to make up for it in some way,” he said.

In an interview with USA Today, the filmmaker said he wanted to bring back Keays-Byrne because an early print of the original Mad Max was released with a poor American dub of his voice.

Miller cast Keays-Byrne as the ruthless biker/gang leader Toecutter in the low-budget Mad Max (1979), then asked the actor to return to the franchise as Immorten Joe, the oxygen-mask-wearing leader of a postapocalyptic village who uses women to birth his followers, in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Born in Kashmir, India, Keays-Byrne was a theater-trained actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company when he remained in Australia when a tour of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Peter Brook, ended there in 1973.