“The Tom Hardy thing was mad,” McCarthy shared in response to a question about getting the “Mad Max: Fury Road” actor on board. “I remember we were on the tech recces [pre-production tech scouting] and I was wandering around the graveyard…Tom was thinking about doing it and he’d had a look at it and he wanted to kind of chat to me about what he was thinking of doing.” Apparently, Hardy had a rather specific idea in mind when it came to bringing Alfie to life.

“He had this whole conversation where he was talking about being a bear,” McCarthy shared on the podcast. “He was like, ‘I’m like good bear, but then I’m like bad bear, and if I get angry bear it’s like scary bear.'” That’s right, a bear. Like the animal. Or honestly, maybe like the type of hairy man. Like many of Hardy’s more creative on-set choices, this story now lives on in anecdote form without the actor ever weighing in on exactly what he meant. Either way, it sounds like a surreal moment for McCarthy. He continued:

“It’s raining and the crew are standing there looking at me like, ‘What is he doing there in this graveyard, under a tree, having this conversation with Tom Hardy about being a bear?’ And I was like, ‘So you want a beard?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah.’ And I was like, ‘Cool, that sounds awesome, that sounds wicked.'”