For the past couple of months, Tom Hardy has been sporting a particularly luxuriant beard, as part of his prep for Mad Max: Fury Road. And it looks like he might not be touching a Mach 3 for a good while longer. Empire got the chance to speak with Hardy and his Lawless co-star Guy Pearce in Cannes, where the former admitted that the long-delayed project still has no set start date.

“We keep moving that around, you know?” he shrugs. “Who knows when it’ll come out? I’ve been on stand-by for two years… but it’s all part of it. It’s kind of the cool thing to do, to be elusive with dates and all that.”

While there has been talk of the Mad Max shoot being so ambitious that it will last an entire year, rumour has it that the schedule has been cut down to trim the budget.

Says Hardy, not entirely seriously: “It was going to be a year of filming, then six months, and now we’re supposed to be doing it in six days. It’s a musical – we’re going to go around shopping centres in a little wagon and sing songs. People were expecting big, but we’re going to give them small. It’ll be a live, free-running musical and it’s coming to a place near you soon.”

And finally, answering the burning question of why Pearce has no eyebrows in Lawless, Hardy points at his beard: “I have his hair. I’m holding onto it.” Pearce laughs. “It’s true, Tom’s got it. He’s stuck it on his face.”