Thor: Ragnrok’s Chris Hemsworth on why he nearly turned down playing Thor

Chris Hemsworth remembers the moment when he was first offered the role of Thor in 2009. And while it seems like a life-changing moment – playing the God of Thunder has taken him from just another young Australian actor to genuine Hollywood stardom – it was such an uncertain prospect that the former Home and Away actor considered turning it down.

After being in development with multiple directors for years, not even studio executives knew how big Thor was going to be in the Marvel universe, Hemsworth says.

“I was crossing the road in Vancouver… and I remember the exact moment getting a call from my lawyer and my manager saying ‘you got the offer’,” he says. “And then kind of going ‘oh wow, cool. So what is it?’ ‘It’s a superhero thing and it’s a six-picture deal.’

“And we were like ‘that’s a lot of films to sign up for. We should pass on this.'”

Hemsworth puts his doubts dwon to “that voice inside you thinking it’s too good to be true”. But he accepted, stacked on nine kilograms of muscle and went off to shoot Thor in California and New Mexico.

Boom!

Thor became a hit, taking almost $US500 million, six years ago. The sequel, Thor: Dark World, did even better with more than $US640 million two years later. And the God of Thunder has since been part of two mega successful Avengers movies (in 2012 and 2015) and Doctor Strange (2016).

“When we shot the first film, I was aware of what it was but had no idea if anyone was going to turn up to see it, let alone then to The Avengers or then do a second Thor or a third Thor or a third, fourth and fifth Avengers,” Hemsworth says.

“You hope and dream that it’s going to be that but each time I’m like ‘it’s going to work, someone turned up, I’m still employed. There’s another job.'”

Hemsworth is speaking in Sydney after the warmly received premiere of Thor: Ragnarok, the third movie in the series.

Beside him is Taika Waititi, the New Zealand director of Boy (2010) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016). As well as playing a memorable alien with a Maori accent in Thor: Ragnarok, he brought comedy to what executive producer Brad Winderbaum calls a “wacky space race adventure kind of buddy movie through the cosmos.”

The movie has the imprisoned Thor battling The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) on the planet Sakaar then facing the goddess Hela (Cate Blanchett) to stop Ragnarok – the Norse version of the apocalyose – in Asgard.

Ready to move on from the Old English dialogue and Shakespearean aspects of the first two movies, Hemsworth says Waititi’s comic approach as humanising Thor.

“There’s sort of a lightness and an uncertainty and a vulnerability to the character which is a lot more accesible,” he says. “You have this god-like character and he’s all-knowing and has all the power in the world and lives in a big shiny gold castle in space. How do you relate to that guy? You try to humanise him.”

As it is for just about every actor, it was a gamble when Hemsworth left Home and Away for Hollywood.

But just weeks after arriving in Los Angeles, he was cast in the crime thriller Ca$h (2010), He also shot two movies relatively quickly – the reboot Star Trek (2009) and the thriller A Perfect Getaway (2009)

But what seems like a meteoric rise was not as easy as it sounds.

“I got a couple of jobs and I thought ‘great, this is what I wanted to happen’,” Hemsworth says. But then there was no more work for a year.

“I had 12 months where every audition I was getting worse feedback,” Hemsworth says. “I was getting more and more nervous and uncertain, thinking: what am I doing? Do I even want this? Trying to convince myself I didn’t want it so it didn’t hurt so much.

“And then something changed. I just said ‘whatever’ and stopped thinking about it so much. Then I got busy again,'”

While he was reputedly rejected for Thor before being offered the role, his flourishing career has gone on to include The Cabin In The Woods (2012), two Snow White and the Huntsman movies (2012 and 2016), Red Dawn (2012), Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), Rush (2013), In the Heart of the Sea (2015), Blackhat (2015) and comic roles in Vacation (2015) and Ghostbusters (2016).

Due to reach cinemas next year are 12 Strong, which has him playing a US special forces captain in Afghanistan, and another return as Thor in Avengers: Infinity War.

Hemsworth says years of work went into his career taking off.

“Yes, it happened relatively quick but at the same time… whether it was acting school or just reading scripts and studying movies and actors I’d admired, I’d done that for years and years,” he says. “Since I was a kid…

“Even if it seemingly happens overnight, there’s a 10,000 hour rule, I think. There’s a whole lot of hours that have gone into it that people didn’t see.”

So where does his career go from here?

With a little prompting from Waititi, Hemsworth says that after Home and Away, Dancing With The Stars, “some bad movies and some good movies” and now comedy, maybe iut’s time to go back to Home and Away.

“I just want to do interesting characters that are fun and work with people like this where you laugh every single day and have a good time,” he says.

“It shouldn’t be a tortuous process, I’ve done a few things where it’s heavy and weighty and it’s not how I want to spend my days.”

Hemsworth says his approach to acting doesn’t mean even serious dramatic roles need to be gruelling.

“You get moments where you need to get in the space,” he says. “But I’m not a method actor. I don’t walk around in character for four months and dig up all sorts of problems in my past.”

It’s a sign of Hemsworth’s Hollywood standing that Thor: Ragnarok was shot in Australia, with funding boosts from the federal and state government allowing Disney and Marvel to base production on the Gold Coast.

That was a short drive from where he lives with his Spanish actor wife, Elsa Pataky, and their three children, aged three to fiver, near Byron Bay.

Hemsworth jokes that shooting the movie here took “a lot of bags of money under the table”.

The more serious answer is that he had “a little more confidence to maybe have an opinion” after playing Thor five times.

“I said, ‘can we shoot in Australia?’ They were like ‘wow, it all depends on this and this and this…’

“Then I started pushing from my end and they were receptive and said ‘if we can make it work, we will.’ And all the pieces just came together.”

Hemsworth gets back to joking with Waititi.

“We had an Australian director on board, which was perfect, all the way from New Zealand,” he says.

Waititi chimes in: “I’m the Phar Lap of the film,” he says. “When I die, you guys are going to tear my body apart and put bits of me in museums. Melbourne Museum can take my heart. Chris, you can have my skeleton.”

Hemsworth said acting opposite Blanchett lifted his game.

“I find you do your best work opposite people who are challenging you or who intimidate you or who you can learn from,” he says. “With Cate, I had in mind what I thought she was going to bring to it and an expectation how great she was going to be and it was just tenfold.

“And there’s no kind of ego or any of that kind of garbage with Cate. What you see is what you get. She’s having a good time. She turns up on time and does her work and goes home and we have a laugh.”

Waititi rejects the idea that he brought out Hemsworth’s talent for comedy.

“I was really surprised that they hadn’t really exploited that side of him in the previous Marvel films,” he says. “Everyone is like ‘oh man, yeah, you really brought that out’, But, no, finally we had the opportunity to let him do his thing. It was always there.”

Hemsworth says that when he tried comedy in previous Marvel movies, the response was usually ‘oh, no, no, no, you just be the straight guy and Iron Man will have the quips’. But Waititi was much more receptive and allowed the cast to improvise.

“He’d encourage us to just screw it up a lot,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. In there somewhere, there’ll be something really great.

Thor: Ragnarok opens in cinemas on October 26.

Original article at The Syndney Morning Herald.