BELLA DAMA
Spanish actress Elsa Pataky was a star in her own right when she became the wife of Chris Hemsworth. Now, she’s revisiting her love of acting.
SPANISH ACTRESS ELSA PATAKY WAS A STAR IN HER OWN RIGHT WHEN SHE BECAME THE WIFE OF CHRIS HEMSWORTH AND MOTHER TO THEIR THREE CHILDREN. NOW, WITH A LEAD ROLE IN A NEW NETFLIX SERIES, SHE’S REVISITING HER LOVE OF ACTING.
Elsa Pataky has a simple solution for having too many favourite pieces of jewellery: wear them all at once. “I like jewellery, so why not? It depends on how you wear it and what you wear it with, but you can just make it yours. This is jewellery I wear every day; I don’t take it off, because I lose all my jewellery,” she purrs in her thick Spanish accent, as she starts describing each piece jingling on her wrists and layered around her neck. There are skulls, a halfmoon, a diamond ‘C’, simple chains in gold and even bronze. “They mean all different things, like I have the ‘C’ for Christopher and then I’m very obsessed with the moon, so I have a half-moon and the other ones I keep changing. I usually put something on and it stays with me for a year and then I change it for another one. These pieces are all sentimental in some way. A lot of them Chris gave me on special occasions and I really don’t want to lose them, so I put them all on, and I do everything while wearing them: I horse-ride, I go to the beach … and I like to mix the hippie pieces that I like with more expensive pieces.”
The Christopher she is referring to is, of course, her husband, Thor star Chris Hemsworth. But that does not define her. A bona fide star in her native Spain, with dozens of film and television credits to her name, she took a hiatus from acting over the past few years to raise the couple’s three children and help cultivate their idyllic bohemian home life on a multimillion-dollar property in Byron Bay. But now Pataky is preparing to immerse herself back into work, starring in a new Netflix show Tidelands – the first Netflix series to be produced in Australia. She is further embracing her adopted home by supporting the local fashion industry, attending her first Australian fashion week, held Sydney this month, as a guest of Vogue and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia.
For this shoot she was styled exclusively in Australian designers, and cites pieces by Maticevski, Aje, Dion Lee and Rebecca Vallance among her favourites, as well as designs by her Byron Bay friends behind the label Spell & The Gypsy Collective.
There is an ease to Pataky’s personal style, which has a boho-with-an-edge kind of vibe, part rock’n’roll, part gypsy Earth mum, and is as eclectic as her jewellery. Post-shoot, she is dressed casually in a cargo jumpsuit and black T-shirt, bare feet curled up on the chair, hands resting on her knees, her short blonde hair perfectly messy, as if she has just stepped off the beach, her petite body tanned and taut from years of yoga.
Pataky’s natural beauty is mesmerising. Born in Madrid, she initially honed her style growing up in the stylish city, and from visiting European fashion shows as she became more famous. But now, at 41, she has grown into her own sense of self and style, a unique blend of Spanish chic and a creative Byron Bay aesthetic.
“I have different phases, which is good. I know what I like, what I don’t like and what works on me,” she muses. “I think that when you are young, you are just trying to follow what’s in fashion, even if it doesn’t look good on you. That’s because it is what everyone is wearing and you have seen it in magazines, but you don’t even realise how it looks on you.
“THESE PIECES ARE ALL SENTIMENTAL IN SOME WAY. A LOT OF THEM CHRIS GAVE ME ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS”
“I think I got to my style a few years ago and [realised] what I like and what suits my lifestyle. When I was living in Madrid, I had to [dress] more urbane: when you go to dinner you wear high heels and have to be polished and have different bags – so my wardrobe was really big with lots of more elegant things. But if you go into my wardrobe now it’s very relaxed because I have three kids, so I can’t go out in heels!
“I have one bag that I use all the time and own far more comfortable clothes that have an edge, so I still like to feel like I am dressing up. It looks really casual but it’s ‘done’, you know?”
Then there are her tattoos: dozens of them scattered over her body, with each one, like her jewellery, carrying a different meaning. There’s the ‘C’ on her wedding finger – recently inked by Hemsworth himself (she did an ‘E’ on his), the symbols for each family member’s initials on her forearm, and three dots on her finger representing her close friends or “three best girls” – including Luciana Barroso, wife of Matt Damon, who has a matching version. Most prominent though, is the Thor symbol on her bicep – which bizarrely she got when she was just 15 years old, decades before she met the man who would become known as the God of Thunder on the big screen.
“Yes, it’s about Thor and I ended up marrying who plays Thor!” she say, laughing. “It is shocking how things in life [turn out]. I just liked that [symbol] and the legend he had was so beautiful and I wanted to keep it.”
Pataky met Hemsworth in 2010, before he became a Marvel superstar, and within a year the couple had married and soon after were pregnant with their first child. They now have three – daughter India Rose, almost six, and four-year-old twins, Tristan and Sasha.
“In the beginning it was beautiful – when I met him he wasn’t known at all and I grew with him and experienced all his successes and changes, and then he became just so huge and I’ve been sharing that too,” she says. “Going through every moment and being there with him with every success was actually a good thing – we grew together. It’s difficult when you go from being an unknown person to a very known person and all the changes that come with that.”
Pataky admits the international fame and instant family happening simultaneously within their first few years together wasn’t always easy. “We did everything very quickly – I don’t know how we survived as a couple. We were married and then a year after we had kids. It puts a lot of pressure on a marriage, but we came out good because there is a lot of love between us and we are very strong personalities but love each other so much. We make it work.
“So I think our years together have been great. Every marriage has ups and downs – it’s constant work to be in a successful marriage and stay together forever. Chris’s parents have been together all their lives, and that’s such a beautiful thing, and their families are so close.”
The couple’s idyllic life and various international adventures plays out over Instagram, in part thanks to Hemsworth being an ambassador for Tourism Australia. Recently, a video of the actor surfing with his daughter clinging to his broad shoulders went viral.
Even Pataky was impressed: “It gave me goosebumps because before having my kids I had read a story about a guy who was talking about his dad and how much he admired him, and there was a photo of him and his father surfing exactly as Chris did with our daughter. I thought: ‘How amazing is that?’ It was so great, and they were having so much fun, and Sasha did it too. The waves were big – and I saw them both ducking under the waves – but they felt very safe in their dad’s arms; they loved it. And Chris was so excited that they loved it.”
While Pataky has embraced family life in Australia, she maintains close ties to her homeland and plans to return to Madrid with the family for a few months this year as part of her new role an ambassador for Spanish Tourism. She also keeps her family close – her brother lives in Byron Bay and acts as the Hemsworths’ photographer, and his fiancé teaches Spanish at their children’s school. But the actress’s biggest project this year is her starring role in
Tidelands. Filming began in Brisbane in March, its proximity to Byron Bay allowing her to still have quality time with her family. Pataky stars as a “darkly enigmatic and keenly intelligent leader of the Tidelanders – a woman unafraid to do anything to meet her ruthless ends”, in the eight-part supernatural series set in a mysterious small fishing village inhabited by a commune outcasts.
“I am so excited about this project,” Pataky says. “I said no to a lot of offers so I could be with my kids, but I had started thinking that I wanted to get back to work and suddenly this project came up. My agent called me about it and when I read the script I loved it – the character is amazing, so interesting to play, and the whole show comes at a really good moment because it’s about women. It’s a great cast and has great young people and the leads are two very strong women.”
Pataky is a proud female role model and is embracing the empowerment movement happening around the world. “It just shows that women have to be equal in every way, and why not? People are not just interested in a lead guy, they want to see stories from women. There have been amazing women in life, strong women who have obstacles in life but keep going … interesting stories about women.
“I also like and the mix of races and like accents now. When I arrived in LA and had an accent it was very difficult … you didn’t have any opportunity to work. But now – look at the lead in Wonder Woman, she’s Israeli! I think for an actor it’s an amazing time, and an amazing time for older women to have more roles, too.”
Pataky is raising all her children to be strong-minded, especially her daughter. “I think it’s good to let her know she can achieve and do whatever she wants in life, and not to be scared of anything. It’s good to just to be like: ‘You know girl, you can do whatever you want, any profession, just like a man can.’ But I also want to tell my boys not to be scared in life and be able to express their feelings – so to be able to tell a woman what they’re feeling. And I also want to encourage them to do whatever they want and not be scared of anything. We have to be equal on both sides.”
“THE CHARACTER IS AMAZING, SO INTERESTING TO PLAY, AND THE WHOLE SHOW COMES AT A REALLY GOOD MOMENT BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT WOMEN”