FROM THOR TO PHWOAR
Chris Hemsworth pushes the boundaries with ocean adventure
‘We need Thor,” one devotee pleaded. “We know he’s in there.” The Norse god of thunder wasn’t in fact “in there”, but Chris Hemsworth, the Australian actor who plays the Marvel Comics version of Thor, was. That was why 50 or so fans were camped outside the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York, across from Central Park, on a damp Sunday morning.
Waiting outside hotels for movie stars is a lonely business that most often ends in disappointment. If he or she knows there’s a crowd outside, the average movie star will duck out a side door and into a waiting limousine to escape the press of adoring fans.
Hemsworth? He cut his lunch hour to 30 minutes to pop downstairs, say hello to his fans and oblige them with some autographs and selfies.
“It’s a Chris Hemsworth kind of thing to do,” said Ron Howard, who directed the 32-year-old Australian in In the Heart of the
Sea, a maritime adventure now showing in Thailand.
If Hemsworth thought he was doing something special for his fans, he wasn’t telling. Settling in for an interview later, he seemed surprised that his trip downstairs even had been noticed.
“I’m all about doing what I feel strongly passionate about in life,” he said. “Today I want to go meet the people. I want to talk about this movie. I can’t wait to go home and see my wife and children.
“With work, I choose scripts based on this idea that I can only do justice to a film if I fall in love with the material and have that passionate feeling,” he continued. “With movies, it gets dangerous when it gets familiar. That’s why you won’t see me play 10 different versions of Thor. “When it gets familiar, you get lazy.” Even his dress was a contrast of different passions. Hemsworth wore a sleek black suit, but the grey T-shirt underneath looked as if he might have slept in it.
In Howard’s film, based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 non-fiction book, Hemsworth plays Owen Chase, first mate of the whaling ship Essex in 1820.
During a hunt, the ship is ripped in two by a raging sperm whale. The shipwrecked crew (among them Tom Holland, Cillian Murphy and Benjamin Walker) are left to fight for their lives in lifeboats for 90 perilous days with almost no food or water and dangers lurking everywhere. They finally resort to cannibalism as their last survival mechanism. The story inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, published in 1851, and in fact is framed by an ageing survivor (Brendan Gleeson) telling the story to an eager, nervous Melville (Ben Whishaw).
“At the heart this is an epic adventure on a grand scale,” Hemsworth said. “I knew it was also a beautiful drama centring on the relationship between men dealing with horrific circumstances we sometimes face in life.
“I loved that my role as Owen had a lot of complexities,” he added. “He’s a family man who doesn’t want to leave his pregnant wife to go to sea and possibly never return. On the other hand, the sea is in his blood. It’s who this man is.”
It was Hemsworth who brought the script to Howard.
“[Producer] Paula Weinstein was talking to my manager about future projects and she brought it to me,” he recalled. “It was around the time I was doing Snow White and the
Huntsman [2012]. I just fell in love with it. Then I went off and did Rush [2013] with Ron.
“When we were finishing Rush,” Hemsworth continued, “Ron said, ‘If anything comes up that you’re interested in, just let me know.’ I said, ‘Well, if you’re not sick of me, let’s go at it again.’ ”
The shoot took place in the Canary Islands, in Spain and at London’s Leavesden Studios. It wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good time, Hemsworth reported.
“We had to look as skinny as possible,” the actor explained. “We started at a few thousand calories a day, and each week we’d reduce the intake. In the last few weeks, we were down to 500 calories a day.” Hemsworth shook his head. “It was a pretty ugly experience to only eat 500 calories a day,” he said. “It led to some interesting mood swings and inconsistent behaviour. My wife can vouch for that.
“What was great about it was that all the men were doing it together, so there was this great camaraderie when it came to the diet. We really did experience those empty bellies together.”
It got to a point at which eating was almost all any of them thought about.
“I remember that, by the time we got to a deserted-island scene, we were down to one afternoon snack, which consisted of a piece of cucumber with some olive oil drizzled
It gets dangerous when it gets familiar. That’s why you won’t see me play 10 different versions of Thor
on it and an almond,” Hemsworth said. “One almond. The men ate it so slowly, relishing every little nibble. In fact, we’d all hunch down and eat it quietly to savour it.
“I felt both terrible and fabulous that we were giving it our all.”
Working on the ocean, however, was a thrill.
“I kind of loved it,” Hemsworth said. “I loved being on the whale boat. Getting on and off the boat was so tricky, especially when you were so hungry. We’d actually sit on the big boat in the hot, beating sun with our beards glued on and our stomachs rumbling.
“It was uncomfortable, but I love that part of acting,” he said. “It was an actual life experience.”
The whale fights were staged in the studio in London, with the actors being tossed around by machines, with the whale added later through the magic of CGI.
“The water in the tank was freezing,” Hemsworth said, grimacing. “I was shot with water cannons and flipped in the air. It was like being on the theme-park ride from hell.”
One scene in the film found the men shipwrecked, with nothing to eat except a small amount of a kind of dry, hard biscuit called hardtack.
“It tasted like gingerbread and was one of our props,” Hemsworth said. “In the later starvation scene, the hardtack box came out one day and I ate my one bite. But I was starving in real life, so I, um … I cheated on my diet.
“I was eating one hardtack after another,” the actor admitted. “Even the prop guys came up and said, ‘Uh, Chris, we don’t have that much of that stuff. Stop eating it.’ In the end I ate the entire box. It was one of the most delicious things ever, but that might just be my previous hunger talking.”
Hemsworth was born in Melbourne to an English teacher and a social-services counsellor. Eventually he and his two brothers — Luke is the oldest, then Chris and then Liam — moved with their parents to the Australian outback in the Northern Territory and then back to Melbourne.
Bitten by the acting bug in high school, Hemsworth landed an early role as King Arthur on the Aussie fantasy series Guinevere Jones (2002), and also a stint on the soap opera Neighbours. In 2004 he moved to Sydney to work on another soap, Home and Away.
British director Kenneth Branagh plucked him from obscurity to cast him as the title character in Thor (2011), a role he has subsequently reprised in The Avengers (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). His other films include Star Trek (2009), The Cabin in the Woods (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman, Red Dawn (2012), Star Trek into Darkness (2013) and Rush (2013).
Coming up is The Huntsman: Winter’s War, due next year, and the all-female Ghostbusters remake, to which he’ll add a bit of testosterone.
Off-screen Hemsworth is to be found in Byron Bay, Australia, where he lives with his wife, actress Elsa Pataky, and their children: three-year-old India Rose and year-old twins, Tristan and Sasha.
“I can’t wait to get into holiday-season mode,” the actor said. “We’re just a bunch of homebodies who cook and invite friends and play with the kids.”
Which leaves only one question: How did Hemsworth like Moby-Dick?
“The book?” he said, choking. “I still haven’t read it.” His sheepish smile became a large grin. “Of course I want the kids to read it someday,” Hemsworth said, laughing. “But they could always watch the movie.”