Chris Hemsworth: ‘I got sick of Thor pretty quick every couple of years’

“I think this is where I used to live,” Chris Hemsworth says, slowing down the rental car and peering out of the window. “Yeah, that’s it.” To our right is a fir-lined avenue that empties into the ocean, and somewhere along the street is the tiny, one-bedroom flat that Hemsworth called home when he was 19 years old. It’s a nice street, in the beautiful suburb of Mona Vale, in a part of Sydney imaginatively called the Northern Beaches, because you get here by driving up and out of the city for about 45 minutes. Hemsworth’s old street is called Seabeach Avenue; it runs perpendicular to another known as Surfview Road, because of its view of the waves. Everything is straightforward here.

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Mona Vale is full of memories. For three years – and over 100 episodes of the Australian soap opera Home and Away, where Hemsworth cut his teeth as an actor and which was filmed just a few beaches away – it was his entire world. It’s been nearly a decade since he was last in the neighbourhood, and while he used to drive this route all the time, these days it’s not quite as fresh in his mind. “Do you think a car crash would be cool for the story?” Hemsworth laughs, shortly after navigating a series of byzantine lane changes and crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. “Or a car chase?”

See Chris Hemsworth at our GQ Heroes event in Oxfordshire, 19-21 July. For more info and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com

Hemsworth has lived in Byron Bay, a blissfully idyllic region on the northern coast of New South Wales, since 2015. We’re back in Mona Vale this afternoon to see a man about a surfboard. Hemsworth and I are getting a private design session with Hayden Cox, the Australian surfboard shaper whose high-performance Haydenshapes boards are beloved by professionals and celebrities alike. On the way, Cox asks us to text through some ideas so that his airbrush artist can prepare the paints. “Let’s go, like, lots of colour,” Hemsworth dictates to me as he drives. “Mushroom trip, acid swelling, ’70s vibe.” When we arrive, Hemsworth is presented with a buffet of fluoro. “All of ’em!”

Cox welcomes us into his studio, a laidback labyrinth covered in such a thick layer of foam dust that every time we move, a white cloud plumes into the air like snow. “Watch your head,” Cox says, as we duck under a low door frame. A board Cox just made, labelled Michael Bublé, is propped against the wall. Cox and Hemsworth have actually known each other since they were both 19, wasting their Mona Vale mornings hunting for the perfect wave. Is Hemsworth a good surfer? “Yeah, he rips,” Cox grins. Hemsworth feigns nonchalance, but is clearly delighted.

Cox’s surfboards start life as blocks of polyurethane foam before being sanded down, or “shaped”, and covered in resin. Cox has prepared a core that is about as long as a king-sized bed. Hemsworth thinks it might be too big. “But, you know, I can ride it in a bigger wave,” he offers, politely. Cox hands him some sandpaper to work out the remaining grooves. Hemsworth lines up his motions in long, smooth sweeps, leaning in studiously so his eyeline is parallel to the board’s curve. “Keep going!” Cox chides him. “The lines aren’t out yet!”

At this point, we’ve been talking for hours and quite a lot of it has been about surfboards. Twinnies, shortboards, grovellers, rail line rockers, rear quads. (A note: I do not surf. “You do now,” Hemsworth tells me.) “I’ve always loved surfing,” Hemsworth says. “It’s one of the few things that holds my attention completely and in its entirety.” When he isn’t near the water, he feels unmoored. Halfway through production on his latest film, Extraction 2, in Prague, he began flying to Hossegor in south-western France to surf every other weekend. “That got me through,” he says. And you better believe the surfing at home in Byron Bay is epic. Whenever Hemsworth isn’t there – when he’s working, when he’s on press tours, even when he jets off on a holiday – he wonders: why did he ever leave?

“There’s a cleansing every time I get in the water. If I’m having some sort of inner conflict or turmoil, it’s the one place I go.” Hemsworth breathes in. “There’s a feeling of starting again.”

Hemsworth has been surfing a lot lately. “I’ve just been enjoying downtime,” he explains. (Later, he has another word for it: “unemployed.”) It has been a “busy 10 years” he says, understating things: eight Marvel mega-blockbusters, a handful of other franchises, and a recent National Geographic docuseries called Limitless, which evolved into a six-episode meditation on the meaning of life. Hemsworth needed a break. Since November he has been parked up at home, alternating between surfing, taking his kids to school, and taking his kids surfing, until he just couldn’t surf any more and had to sit quietly with his thoughts.

Sitting with his thoughts is something Hemsworth has in the past actively tried to avoid; it’s partly why he is so drawn to surfing, where the mind folds into the body and for a moment you are at one with the waves. It’s also why he’s been working so furiously, notching up 22 films since the first Thor. “I find most of your problems are created through boredom, when you’re sitting around and you have nothing else to think about except, ‘Oh, what can I pick apart here, what else can I assess and criticise within myself?’” Hemsworth says. Having time off these past months hasn’t always been a pleasant experience in that respect. “All of a sudden, there’s a lot of questions that I probably haven’t answered… I’ve been conveniently distracted and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s look a little deeper.’” What were those questions? “Nothing overly dramatic,” Hemsworth says. You know, just the simple ones: “Who am I? What am I doing? What’s my contribution? Is what I’m doing of value?”

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Earlier in the day, we’re sitting inside Hemsworth’s favourite restaurant at Crown Sydney, the swanky harbourside hotel where he stayed while making the forthcoming Fury Road prequel Furiosa in 2022. Despite the place being glass on all sides, like an exquisite fishbowl, we find a quiet corner upstairs where Hemsworth sits comfortably ensconced in the seclusion,  facing the water. Hemsworth in person is as tall as he appears on screen, not quite as jacked, but still plainly, unpretentiously handsome. He arrives in black jeans and a blue jumper the exact same shade as his eyes, and orders an Italian take on steak tartare, two salads, some focaccia and an enormous Cotoletta Milanese [veal in breadcrumbs] to share. “I like doing this thing,” he says, gesturing between us, “where it’s an actual conversation with someone.” He finds television interviews hard. “It’s live, you have 90 seconds to be interesting, charming, sell the film and not say anything stupid or offensive. Oh god.” He cringes, laughing.

Hemsworth is someone who wants to be liked. It’s not a difficult task; he’s familiar and self-effacing and very funny, but it’s his honesty – open and disarming – that endears him the most. He apologises a few times for repeating himself, but it’s obvious that the questions Hemsworth has been asking himself these past few months are at the front of his mind, and our conversation loops back to them again and again. Who am I? What am I doing? What’s my contribution? Is what I’m doing of value?

It’s been just over a decade since Hemsworth burst onto our screens as Thor, looking like he’d won the genetic lottery. Weapons-grade charm, no chaser. “I mean, he’s god-like, right?” says Joe Russo, who directed him in two Avengers films and wrote both Extraction movies. “When he walks into a room, all the charisma points to Chris Hemsworth.” Hemsworth was 25 when he got the role. (“Marvel Rolls The Dice, Casts No-Names For Thor” read one headline.) The gamble paid off: he has since played the character in eight films and become the template for Marvel’s ability to take a lesser-known actor and turn them into a global megastar.

Hemsworth is good at playing the good guy. But he’s great at playing the bad guy, a cinematic sleight of hand that is still a delight in everything from Spiderhead to Bad Times at the El Royale and, thrillingly, next year’s Furiosa. “There’s a lot of dimensions to him,” agrees Furiosa director George Miller. “He can turn his hand to anything.” Hemsworth’s sweet spot is when good and bad collide, as they do in the Extraction series, in which he plays the guilt-ridden and seemingly indestructible mercenary Tyler Rake. The first Extraction is one of the most-watched Netflix films of all time; a sequel arrives this summer. They are both directed by Sam Hargrave, who met Hemsworth in his capacity as Chris Evans’s stunt double on Avengers. “I’ve never come across a challenge that he wasn’t up for,” says Hargrave. On Extraction 2, that included being repeatedly set on fire. “When I pitched that to him – actually setting him on fire, not doing it via CGI – he kind of looked at me sideways, smiled and said, ‘Sounds awesome mate,’” Hargrave laughs. (He puts the flames out by punching a henchman in the face; fire safety, Hemsworth-style.)

Hemsworth has always been a physical actor. He has thrown himself off rooftops (Extraction, many times) at tanks (12 Strong) and whales (In the Heart of the Sea), and at Charlize Theron, in two separate The Huntsman films. But physicality is also the way that he understands acting itself. He once dreamed of being a professional Aussie Rules footballer, and when he talks about work his parlance is littered with sporting terminology. (“Game day”; “on the field”; “you aren’t trying to win the race, you are the race.”)

“There’s a big overlap between actors and athletes,” suggests Miller. Both, he explains, require a combination of innate talent and intense practice. “The key to it is: in the moment of performance, having done all that hard work, you then need to be able to just abandon yourself to the moment. That’s what I see, not only in Chris’s work but in meeting him and understanding how he thinks about the world.”

The Extraction films made Hemsworth feel like an athlete, demanding in a different way to the Marvel movies. “Thor required me to come in and look a certain way, and it was mostly, sort of, aesthetic body work, whereas this, there was a far greater athleticism needed,” he says. The highlight of Extraction 2 is a 21-minute “one-er”, styled to look like a single shot – it’s almost double the length of the one in the first movie – in which Hemsworth does increasingly insane stunts, like clamber on top of a moving train to shoot down a helicopter. Hemsworth describes landing it as like “kicking the winning goal in a game of footy”. It’s an apt comparison. As Hargrave puts it: “In these one-ers, you’re not just doing action. You’re doing action and acting. He’s bringing the whole bag of tricks on set every day, and that’s a lot for an actor.  He brought a level of intensity and professionalism that very few actors out there can rival.”

Stunt training is great, Hemsworth says, for not thinking about anything else other than what’s right in front of you: running, jumping, punching a fire out, repeat. Like surfing, it is another way Hemsworth can quieten his rowdy mind. “You’re out of your head and into your body a thousand per cent. You’re here, present, in this moment,” he explains.

Learning to let go has been the work of a decade. “It’s the biggest obstacle and something I had a lot of trouble with early in my career,” he admits. When Hemsworth was that 19-year-old in Mona Vale just starting out, “there was so much pressure I put on myself, as to what  I wanted to do and how good I wanted to be.” Now, his approach is roughly thus: “The only way to find the magic, or the really special moments, is just being okay with the fact that it might not work. And that doesn’t mean you don’t care, I care about it more than anything. But you need to surrender to the process and realise that, ‘Look, I’ve done my part and the outcome to this is beyond my control.’”

Still, he bristles when I ask him about criticisms of Marvel by filmmakers including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, who recently queried whether Marvel actors are really movie stars. (In a podcast interview last year, Tarantino said that the characters, not the actors, are the stars.) “That’s super depressing when I hear that,” Hemsworth says. “There goes two of my heroes I won’t work with. I guess they’re not a fan of me.” The way Hemsworth sees it, Marvel movies have served an important purpose. “I’m thankful that I have been a part of something that kept people in cinemas. Now, whether or not those films were to the detriment of other films, I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t love when we start scrutinising each other when there’s so much fragility in the business and in this space of the arts as it is… I say that less to the directors who made those comments, who are all, by the way, still my heroes, and in a heartbeat I would leap to work with any of them. But I say it more to the broader opinion around that topic.”

He sighs. “I don’t think any of us have the answer, but we’re trying.”

Everyone’s a critic these days. Even Hemsworth’s kids’ friends were in on it with his most recent Marvel offering, Thor: Love and Thunder. They didn’t hold back. “It’s a bunch of eight-year-olds critiquing my film. ‘We thought this one had too much humour, the action was cool but the VFX weren’t as good,’” he recalls. “I cringe and laugh equally at it.” Released in 2022, Love and Thunder was a hit at the box office but received mixed reviews from the (grown-up) critics. “I think we just had too much fun. It just became too silly,” reflects Hemsworth. He pauses. “It’s always hard being in the centre of it and having any real perspective… I love the process, it’s always a ride. But you just don’t know how people are going to respond.”

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Hemsworth grew up in the south-eastern corner of Australia, in Victoria, first in the city of Melbourne and then two hours outside it on Phillip Island, where the surf is legendary. (“I’ll tell you one thing: if you learn to surf down in the southern ocean, you’re definitely going to be a little bit more hardy than us east-coast guys,” Cox notes.)

Hemsworth surfed most weekends with his brothers, fellow actors Luke and Liam, and his dad Craig. “It was all I thought about the entire week,” Hemsworth says. “I didn’t really have much of a social life during high school. I wasn’t really going out to parties. All I wanted to do was surf and watch movies. It kept me out of trouble, I think.”

When Luke got a job at a surf shop, so did Chris. But the pay wasn’t great, “only about five, six bucks an hour,” he says, and he could never afford a board of his own. “Every surfboard I had was a hand-me-down or something I bought at a garage sale.” Now, he can’t help himself: he has about 15 at home. He shrugs. “There are far worse addictions out there.”

Hemsworth followed Luke into acting, too. “He did a film and television acting course once a week after school,” Hemsworth remembers. “I thought, That looks like fun! And as soon as I did it, it became an obsession.” There were two motivations driving him. “My parents didn’t have very much money. How can I get them out of this situation of financial burden and how can I not be in that situation?” he explains. But the real reason was that he loves to play. “Continually tapping into the inner child within myself that loved playing dress-up in the back yard with his brothers… I didn’t want to sit behind a desk and do the same thing every day, and punch in, punch out. I wanted to be on an adventure.”

The adventure has lasted now for more than two decades. Hemsworth has a milestone birthday in a few months. “I don’t think I wanna turn 40,” he admits. “I still feel like I’m 25 and I’ve got heaps of time. Now I’m like, ‘Oh, I could be halfway. More than halfway.’”

That’s still a lot of time, I say.

“It is a lot of time,” he agrees. A pause. “If I get there! The reality of ‘I’m not going to be here forever’ is sinking in.”

He thought about that a lot in January, when he received the news of his Avengers co-star Jeremy Renner, who was seriously injured in a snowplough accident. “We were all on our Avengers text chain, we were all chatting. And it was wild. None of us really knew how serious it was,” Hemsworth says. “I think anything like that, it’s an immediate realisation of ‘Wow, any of us can go at any minute…’” He trails off.

At the restaurant, our lunch has arrived. Hemsworth pushes steak tartare around his plate. “We’re getting to the age now where we’re going to start losing people we love.”

This is when Hemsworth tells me that his grandfather recently died.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“You’re all right,” he replies, smiling sadly.

Hemsworth’s grandfather, Martin, was 93, and had Alzheimer’s. During the course of making Limitless, Hemsworth learnt that he has two copies of the gene APOE4, indicating he may have eight to 12 times the average risk of inheriting the disease. Hemsworth remembers everyone at the funeral talking about his grandfather with such respect. “My uncle specifically said, ‘He’s remembered as a good bloke.’ And if he knew, or if someone told him that’s how he would be remembered, how incredibly proud he would feel.”

“It made me think about my own life,” Hemsworth admits. “And it wasn’t about career or anything. It was about being remembered as someone who was good and kind and contributed something of value… I certainly don’t think about the films I’m going to leave behind and how people are going to remember me in that sense. I hope that people think of me fondly and that I was a good person. That I was a good bloke. Like my grandpa.”

Growing up, the Hemsworth brothers spent many afternoons at their grandparents’ house while their parents worked. “It felt so big. My memory of it was this huge house,” Hemsworth says, but the reality was more down to earth: two bedrooms, one of which had been divided in half. “I laughed about it with my brother the other day. We don’t need much, do we? You can trick yourself into thinking more is somehow the answer to happiness.” He pulls out his phone and shows me a home video from his childhood: a blond-haired toddler sitting on his mum’s lap, his grandfather making his way towards them from the back porch. Hemsworth remembers him as a man who was never angry, who cooked his sausages on the barbecue until they were black. Hemsworth took him on a global press tour for the first Thor movie; first class, the works. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see his face. He’s really going to appreciate this.’ And he had the same appreciative, happy look on his face that he had when he was cooking the burnt sausages in the backyard. It was all the same to him.”

Lately, Hemsworth has been thinking more about time, and the passing of it. “Everything has more importance now,” he explains. “Because of the realisation that this isn’t going to last forever.” That includes work. “I don’t want to leave a pile of rubbish behind,” Hemsworth says. “And I’m aware that there’s a few misses there.”

Like what?

“The internet will tell you.”

So he has started seeking out new challenges. Directing, maybe. “I think about it a lot, and more  recently, than I ever have.” He has spoken to a friend of a friend about it – the friend is Matt Damon, the friend-of-the-friend is Ben Affleck – who shared that acting in a movie you are also directing can be exhausting. “Ben said it’s really tricky,” Hemsworth says. “It’s much easier just to sit behind the camera than to try and do both.” He still wants to act in a romantic drama. (He got close recently with an A Star Is Born–esque feature, until he realised it would require him to sing about 20 covers of some of the most iconic songs of all time. “That scares the hell out of me to the point of submission.”)

For the first time since his career took off in earnest, Hemsworth doesn’t know what will come next. “I’ve had my next job booked two or three years ahead of me for the last 12 years,” he says. These days he asks himself the question: if work is going to take him away from his family, what is he getting out of it? “It has to be more than a career move,” he says. It has to be something “worthy of my time”.

That may still include more Thor movies. “I love the experience,” he begins. “I love the fact that I’ve been able to do something fairly different throughout the process. Thor 1 and 2 were their own thing, Thor 3 and 4 were a very different feel… and then even Avengers, the Lebowski Thor, the Infinity War Thor, due to different directors and I think mostly my own need to do something different. You know, I got sick of the character pretty quick every couple of years,” he laughs.

Russo praises Hemsworth’s comedic timing, increasingly on display as the franchise evolved. “He’s one of the funnier actors we’ve worked with, he’s very gifted,” Russo says. “You see it in Thor in Infinity War and Endgame… It’s very hard to pull off what he did in those movies, because he’s both ridiculous at times and utterly tragic.” The comedic gear shift was something Hemsworth relished; he’d need another if he was to return. “If I was going to do something again it would have to be tonally different. And we’d have to do something very drastic to keep people on their toes. Otherwise it’s just the fatigue of those characters and those films, where people are like, ‘I’ve seen it.’”

We talk about Marvel for a bit. He saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – “really cool” – but hasn’t seen Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. He asks what I thought about the movie and is interested in my opinion, which is essentially: why did they have to make it so big? “That’s the trick: you have to separate all those stories,” Hemsworth replies. “The moment it’s like,” – he does his best trailer voice – “‘Your world is in danger, the entire universe!’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, so [it] was the last 24 films.’ It has to become a bit more personal and grounded.” He is always open to returning to Thor, “seeing what they have to offer creatively, if there is something new” for the character. “But I really wanna do some other stuff for a while.”

Like Furiosa, slated for release next year, Miller’s prequel to his six-time Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road. Hemsworth plays a bearded biker warlord called, spectacularly, Dementus. “I came into that film exhausted. I thought, ‘How am I going to get through this?’” Hemsworth admits. “Week one of rehearsals with [Miller], all of a sudden it was this reigniting of my creative energy.” It was, Hemsworth declares, “by far the best experience of my career, and something I feel the most proud of. It made me think, the work isn’t what’s exhausting, it’s what kind of work it is, and how invested I am in it and if it is challenging in the right ways.” He calls Miller “masterful”. “I’m on the hunt for more George Millers. Or more of George Miller,” Hemsworth grins. “If he’ll have me.”

When I put this to Miller, he laughs with delight. “Of course! It would be a thrill. There’s just no question,” he says. He praises Hemsworth’s dedication and precision. “Always prepared, no matter how difficult the scene, always working really hard. There’s no distractions, very focused.” But he also mentions Hemsworth’s grounded presence on set. “He’ll do everything that is needed to get the film made as well as it possibly can. He’ll work with other actors, even in smaller parts, and bond with them. If there’s any issues, and productions can sometimes be fraught, he’s the one who by example is able to calm things,” Miller adds. “We all know people, on both sides of the camera, who seem to unravel the more power and fame they get, and Chris is the antithesis of that.”

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What does it mean to be a good person?  A man could spend his life answering that question. Does it mean that you’re a good husband? A good partner? Hemsworth has been married for more than a decade to the actor Elsa Pataky. “Goes so fast,” Hemsworth smiles. “Like everything. We were having kids the same time my career was taking off, same time we were getting married, same time we were getting to know each other. It feels like we got to know each other halfway through our relationship, five, six years ago. In a beautiful way. Once our kids were out of nappies, things became a bit more manageable.” Their partnership is rock solid, founded on friendship and the desire to “have a good time, to laugh, and be involved in new adventures”. It is also, Hemsworth admits, the thing that has enabled him to be who he is: “Her sacrifice, commitment, work, support, forgiveness – everything that she has given me over the years has been incredible. I couldn’t have done any of the things I’ve done without it.”

Together, they have three children: daughter India and twin boys Tristan and Sasha. “He’s a very dedicated family man,” notes Russo. “I admire that about him.” His children were born in the years that Hemsworth described in the emotional final episode of Limitless as feeling like they were on fast-forward. “From when Thor started to the last couple of years,” he explains. “I was going from one film to another, didn’t know if the phone was going to stop ringing. I’d spent so many years coming up thinking, Am I going to make it? And once it starts to roll you’re like, I don’t want to get off this train. This could be my one shot.” Hemsworth felt like he was running an endless sprint. “All of these beautiful moments were rapidly flying past me.” That realisation, which crystallised during the making of Limitless, was confronting. “It made me just kind of want to wrap that show and get back and see my family,” he admits. “And I did.”

So he went home to beautiful Byron Bay. He surfed. He took his kids to school. He took his kids surfing. He thought about the questions that he has been thinking about, in one way or another, for the past 20 years. Who am I? What am I doing? What’s my contribution? Is what I’m doing of value? Did he find the answers? “Yes,” he replies. “The search in itself is part of the problem. The constant need for an answer and a solution. It’s okay not to know, or just accept the fact that the only certainty is inconsistency and change.” Now, he is seeking to embrace that uncertainty and live in the moment. Something he wants to do, that he is really trying his best to do, is live his life as if everything were for the last time. Every film could be the last one, every wave the final wave you ever surf.

So, at home these past months, with Hollywood more than 7,000 miles away, that’s what Hemsworth has been doing. If the surf is good he grabs his board and paddles straight out into the ocean. At night, when he puts the kids to bed, he tries to press pause. “There are nights where I’m just like, ‘Just go to sleep,’” he groans. “Or all three of them want to sleep in the bed, and we’re like, ‘We just want a night alone.’” But in a few years, they’re not going to be doing that any more, he points out. “They’re not jumping on you, cuddling you, kissing you and all that in the same way. That for me is a real slap into the moment just to soak it up.”

One of his sons decided recently that he wants to read bedtime stories to his dad. “The other night I’m looking at him going, This is the most beautiful thing, and how many more times will this happen?” These years are the golden ones, but they’re fleeting. Time is precious, and once it’s gone you’re never going to get it back. Hemsworth doesn’t want to let another decade go by on fast-forward. “Yes, it’s daunting and terrifying, the awareness that the clock is ticking,” he says. “But I’m going to soak up every moment.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Georges Antoni
Styling by Sarah Starkey
Grooming by Sarah Tammer
Tailoring by Simone Ellis
CGI artwork by Ben Fearnley