Thor star Chris Hemsworth has admitted his last outing for Marvel was “bats–t crazy, wild”, and “too silly” for its own good.
Hemsworth, who opened up in an interview with British GQ this week, said cast and crew “just had too much fun” in last year’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
“It just became too silly,” Hemsworth told the magazine, adding he now he wants to “do some other stuff for a while”.
Thor: Love and Thunder, was the 29th title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and directed by Taika Waititi. But it brought only mediocre reviews when it was released in 2022.
“It’s always hard being in the centre of it and having any real perspective,” Hemsworth, 39, told GQ.
“I love the process; it’s always a ride. But you just don’t know how people are going to respond.”
He said the film was “bats–t crazy, wild”, and directed by “Taika at his craziest”.
“Taika, normally, is kind of at an 11, so you can do the math there. He described it as like he’d been given the keys to the kingdom, and someone said, ‘Here if a seven-year-old was making a movie, what would you do?’ He said, ‘Well, I want to put this in it. I want to do this. I want to try this.’ And everything he suggested, I said yes to, and then we had this insane film in front of us,” Hemsworth said.
The Australian star said even his children and their friends found fault with the movie.
“It’s a bunch of eight-year-olds critiquing my film,” he said.
“[They said] ‘we thought this one had too much humour, the action was cool but the VFX weren’t as good’. I cringe and laugh equally at it.”
Hemsworth’s admission came as British acting legend Sir Anthony Hopkins described his work in the Thor films as “pointless acting”.
Hopkins joined the cast of Thor, Kenneth Branagh’s film version of the Marvel comic, in 2011. He played Odin, the father of the titular character, and also appeared in 2013’s Thor: The Dark World and 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, but had no role in Waititi’s 2021 version.
“If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it,” Hopkins told New Yorker magazine.
“They put me in armour; they shoved a beard on me,” he told the magazine on Monday.
“Sit on the throne, shout a bit.”
Hopkins’ criticism echoes commentary about the Marvel movies from cinematic giants such as Martin Scorsese, who once said the films were “not cinema”, and Quentin Tarantino, who said Marvel actors weren’t true movie stars.
Hemsworth admitted to GQ that the criticism stung.
“That’s super-depressing when I hear that,” he said. “There goes two of my heroes I won’t work with. I guess they’re not a fan of me.”
Hemsworth, who has played Thor since 2011, said he loved making the movies, but said he got sick of the character pretty quickly.
“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,” he said.
He said he was open to returning as 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,” he said.
But he also said he was thankful to “have been a part of something that kept people in cinemas”.
“Whether or not those films were to the detriment of other films, I don’t know,” he said.
“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.”
Hemsworth’s reconsideration of his Marvel future came ahead of the release of his new film, Extraction 2. It is released on Netflix on June 16.
Hemsworth will also be seen in Furiosa, a Mad Max: Fury Road prequel co-starring Anya Taylor-Joy. It will be released in 2024.
