Meet the Flame-Throwing Heavy Metal Guitarist from ‘Mad Max’

Watch out, Nikki Sixx! There's another flame-throwing axeman invading the music world, courtesy of the new movie Mad Max: Fury Road.

Meet the Doof Warrior, a blind guitar-playing mutant who steals every scene he's in despite never uttering a single word of dialogue. He's a member of the "War Boys," the bad guys who are in constant pursuit of our hero Max (played by Tom Hardy) and his new ally, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron).

During many of the movie's insanely action-filled chase scenes, the red-onesie-wearing Doof Warrior can be seen and heard blasting out Ministry-like riffs while dangling precariously via bungee cords from a truck overloaded with amplifiers.

Basically, it looks like someone dropped Motley Crue's stage set onto an armored truck and turned it loose in the desert. As you can see from the video below, Sixx has been kicking off the band's performances of "Shout at the Devil" with a similar flamethrowing stunt each night on the band's current farewell tour. (Sixx seems to have made the connection as well, based on his Instagram post from yesterday.)

Impressively, in this era of blockbusters where the action sequences look less and less real and more like animated cartoons (sorry, Avengers: Age of Ultron!), the metal mayhem you see on screen actually took place in real life. As Fury Road production designer Colin Gibson explained to MTV, there's no CGI involved in the Doof Warrior's performance. "The plan basically was to try to come up with a vehicle, an idea that could be heard over the roar of a couple of hundred amps," he explained. "And the only way to do that was to build the largest, last Marshall stack at the end of the universe."

An Australian actor and musician named iOTA was cast as the Doof Warrior. "They said the character was somewhere between Keith Richards and a scarecrow," he told Buzzfeed about his audition. "So I just kind of got in my best Mad Max 2 outfit: feathers and leather and bits and pieces. I blackened out my teeth and went in there looking pretty disgusting. I played my guitar and that was it. I got the gig."

It was then that iOTA learned that he'd be dangling from wires during the film's battle sequences. “I was hanging from the top of this truck tearing through the desert, just going, ‘How did this happen?! How did I get here?!’” According to Gibson, the guitar weighed about 132 pounds and at director George Miller's insistence, really worked.

Well... sort of. “You know, the guitar wasn’t great,” iOTA admits. “It spent a lot of time in the sun and the sand and the cold. So it was pretty hard to get a good tune out of it. But it was a lot of fun. … I would just jam. I was standing above an amplifier, which you can’t see there. But it was lying on its back. I was standing above it, so the guitar was actually blaring in my ears. I just went for it. I pulled out all my rock licks that I could think of.”

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