‘I Became a Parody of Myself’

The actor, who was a veritable unknown at 25 when he took on the MCU’s most challenging character in the 2011 film Thor. His latest outing as the Norse God came in 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, and Hemsworth is sorry about that.

After the previous film, 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, was hit with rave reviews as new director Taika Waititi and Hemsworth leaned a little more into the humor, they perhaps took it too far with the franchise’s fourth outing.

It was a long, difficult journey with Hemsworth and the character, with the actor admitting to Vanity Fair in a new cover story interview, “Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team.”

He went on to elaborate, explaining, “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?’ Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”

While Hemsworth was notably hard on himself in the role, his MCU co-star Robert Downey Jr., who won fans over as egocentric Tony Stark (aka Iron Man), had nothing but praise for what he’s done with the challenging character.

“First off, Thor as a character was super tricky to adapt — lots of implied limitations — but he and [first director] Ken Branagh figured out how to transcend, make him somehow relatable but godlike,” Downey said.

“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.” He described Hemsworth’s first three Thor films as “a formidable hat trick.”

He notably left out the fourth and final film (so far), Love and Thunder. Hemsworth would not disagree, though, telling VF, “I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself. I didn’t stick the landing.”

This isn’t the first time Hemsworth has been less-than-flattering about Thor: Love and Thunder. In June 2023, he walked back some of his harsher comments in a British GQ interview while chatting with Yahoo! Entertainment.

In the aforementioned GQ interview, he said of the negative reception. that they “just had too much fun. It just became too silly.” The actor then qualified those remarks, telling Yahoo! “I was a little silly. Not silly — we were having so much fun, and that’s sometimes too much of a good thing.”

“I still love the film,” continued the Australian actor. “You have to critique and look at what worked in case you do it again on a different film. The lesson I took was have fun with the comedy and so on, but what’s the emotional drive and component here? Is this something relatable?”

“Then you can add on all the jokes and the fantastical special effects and the elements,” he finished. “But if there’s not a strong enough through-line, sometimes you’re just having too much fun.”

He also suspects that a fifth Thor outing would probably be his last, telling VF in 2022, “I feel like we’d probably have to close the book if I ever did it again. I feel like it probably warrants that. I feel like it’d probably be the finale, but that’s not based on anything anyone’s told me or any sort of plans.”

The way he sees it, though, “You have this birth of a hero, the journey of a hero, then the death of a hero, and I don’t know — am I at that stage? Who knows?”

Whether or not he’s able to give fans a fifth Thor movie remains to be seen, but the actor effortlessly slid into another beloved franchise, joining the prequel film Furiosa: A Mad Max Story — though you might have to squint under that prosthetic nose, beard and brown contacts to recognize him.

Hemsworth stars as Warlord Dementus alongside Anya Taylor-Joy’s Imperator Furiosa, Lachy Hulme’s Immortan Joe, and Tom Burke’s Praetorian Jack. Furiosa: A Mad Max Story hits theaters May 24.