‘RAGNAROK’ AND ROLL
Marvel’s ultimate fighters, Thor and Hulk, mix it up in Sydney.
It’s funny how friendships evolve in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One minute characters are bashing each other stupid, the next they’re besties. The story goes that actors Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo — aka Thor and Hulk, who appear together in the latest Disney/Marvel release Thor: Ragnarok — were hanging around one day wondering why they’d been left out of Captain America:
Civil War. Recalls Hemsworth on a recent sunny afternoon inside Sydney’s Park Hyatt: “They were talking about every character except us. So I said to Mark, ‘Are you in that film?’ And he said, ‘No, no.’ So I asked Kevin (Feige, Marvel Studios president), when are we going to get to do a film together? And then it happened and it was great, because Mark and I had never spoken on camera together. We got to sort of invent that chemistry and relationship and improvise it.”
Ruffalo remembers it slightly differently. “They put Chris and me together in a press junket for the first Avengers, and we had so much fun, we were so playful together, I started saying, ‘Let’s find a movie to do together.’ And I thought it was going to be a buddy cop movie, but when Thor 3 came around he said, ‘Hey, man, why don’t you come and do this with me? Taika (Waititi) will direct it, and let’s just have fun.’”
Director Waititi is the third piece of the puzzle. The New Zealander who got an Oscar nom for his short Two Cars, One Night