Chris Hemsworth is sharing his thoughts and some regrets about his portrayal of Thor in Taika Waititi’s Love and Thunder.
“I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he said in a new profile for Vanity Fair. “I didn’t stick the landing.”
Hemsworth also expressed frustration and dissatisfaction with the character that he played across eight films between 2011 and 2022.
“Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team,” Hemsworth told Vanity Fair. “I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun.”
“What’s my character doing? It was always about, ‘You’ve got the wig on. You’ve got the muscles. You’ve got the costume. Where’s the lighting?’ ” he added. “Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”
However, his co-star Robert Downey Jr. was having none of it. “First off, Thor as a character was super tricky to adapt—lots of implied limitations—but he and Ken Branagh figured out how to transcend, make him somehow relatable but godlike,” Downey told Vanity Fair in the profile. “Hemsworth is, in my opinion, the most complex psyche out of all us Avengers. He’s got wit and gravitas, but also such restraint, fire, and gentleness.”
Hemsworth will next be seen in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a prequel to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Hemsworth said it was a welcome change of pace following the intense Extraction 2 for Netflix.
“As soon as I got to rehearsals [for Furiosa], everything lifted. I just got reinvigorated. Suffering without a purpose is awful,” he said. “Suffering with purpose can be rejuvenating and replenishing. I’d grown so tired of myself, and now I had to lose myself in a character.”
Considering his next role after that, Hemsworth told the publication “he thinks he owes the audience another Thor following Love and Thunder.
“The one side of my brain tells me, Oh, you took too much time off and now the train’s passed you by,” he said. “The more rational mind is like, You’ve turned down a lot of stuff too—big action films where there wasn’t a solid script.”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga hits theaters on May 24.