When we spoke to Tom Hardy at Cannes a couple of weeks ago, he claimed not to know anything about when George Miller's long-awaited and much-beleaguered fourth Mad Max film would finally start shooting. "Who knows?" he said. "It's cool to be elusive with dates." Either that has changed very quickly, or he was being deliberately sneaky, since Charlize Theron has just told Shock that she leaves for Nambia in three weeks, and shooting on Fury Road is set for mid-July.

"I'm very excited about it; I'm fucking dying!" enthuses Theron. "It's been three years; its time to skin this cat already!"

For those who've not been following the story, Mad Max: Fury Road was all set to go in its usual Broken Hill locations in Australia some time ago until extraordinary rains and floods turned the desert into a verdant flower garden; not quite the blasted wasteland the production was counting on.

"It was a huge problem," says Theron now. "The desert never recovered. Well, it did recover in a beautiful way, just not the way we needed!" The huge number of vehicles that had already been built for the film ended up parked, unused, for more than a year, until the relocation to Africa.

We still don't know much about Theron's role in the film. She might be called Furiosa, and she might have part of one arm missing, but none of that's officially confirmed intel. She's been described as "the main chick", but whether that means an Auntie Entity-type antagonist or some sort of ally for Hardy's Max remains to be seen. But the character is, says Theron, nothing like anything she's ever read. "I'm scared shitless," she confides. "It's a really challenging piece of material. It's not the original Mad Max, it's the revamped Mad Max. The whole thing is just very, very exciting."

Nicholas Hoult, Riley Keough, Adelaide Clemens and Zoe Kravitz were all also in the cast, last we heard. George Miller is directing as always, and his producing partner Doug Mitchell has intimated that a whole new trilogy is afoot. They'll need to finally get the first one in the can before any more can happen though. We'll keep you posted on whether that actually starts happening next month.

For more from Theron, check out the new issue of Empire!