Liam Hemsworth’s four years of living famously
Former professional surfer, Australian actor riding giant wave of Hollywood success
Relaxing in a West Hollywood hotel suite, Liam Hemsworth paused to consider his last four years away from his Australian home. It takes him a while. He has a great deal to process. After moving to L.A. in 2009, he went from one negative to a lot of positives quickly.
Sure, he lost the Thor role to older brother Chris, but he went on to win the high-profile Gale Hawthorne part in the hugely popular young adult Hunger Games film series.
“I sometimes wonder about it all,” admitted the affable and bearded 23-year-old promoting the thriller Paranoia, which opened Friday. Included in the wondrous stretch, of course, is his engagement to Miley Cyrus; they met on the 20010 movie version of Nicholas Sparks novel, The Last Song.
Just maybe the best is yet to come. Besides his off-again-on-again proposed marriage to the pop star, he is heading into an almost year-long Hunger Games shoot of the two-movie production for Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2 starting in September.
His only break will arrive with, ironically, a worldwide publicity tour for the much anticipated release of the second Hunger Games flick, Catching Fire, which opens to a great deal of anticipation on Nov. 22. For now, though, there is Paranoia and his opportunity to act opposite two of his favourites in the business — Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman. In the film, Hemsworth plays Adam Cassidy, a bright and ambitious phenom in the tech world who accepts a job as a corporate spy to obtain groundbreaking data from a rival company headed by the legendary Jock Goddard (Ford).
The architect of the illegal and dangerous company infiltration is Goddard’s former protégé Nicolas Wyatt (Oldman) who has more than payback on his mind. Amber Heard is Emma Jennings, a marketing expert and Cassidy’s love interest, who becomes embroiled in the deception. Based on the bestselling Joseph Finder novel as a techno-cautionary-tale, the movie emphasizes the modern-day issue of privacy as much as it does the action.
“I try to find characters that I think are going to challenge me, and I think this is definitely one of those,” Hemsworth said. “This is completely different from anything I’ve done.”
What is familiar to him is the ambition that drives his Cassidy. “I liked that he had something that everyone can relate to from the beginning — he wants to climb the ladder,” said the actor. “He wants to be successful, and he gets pushed down a road that he wouldn’t normally go down, and finds himself in a pretty dangerous position.”
The bonus of acting opposite Ford and Oldman added to the excitement. The esteemed veterans had last stared each other down in 1997’s Air Force One; Ford as the hero American president and Oldman as the villain terrorist.
Luckily for Hemsworth, he had a faceoff with each of them, plus he’s part of a tense sequence when they face off with each other. “It was great to sit there on set and watch Gary and Harrison go head to head. Particularly in those last few scenes when we’re in the room together, and my character watches them, and in real life I was watching, too. It was very exciting.”
He was also enthusiastic about the subtext of Paranoia, which exposes how vulnerable we are in the digital age. “We don’t have these security things in place to protect us, and technology advances so quickly that we haven’t thought about everything that comes with it.” Indeed, Paranoia hints at, but never suggests outright, that one of the biggest global threats in the future just might arrive from cyber manipulation.
“They talk about terrorist groups now hacking into (nuclear) power plants and all these things that are run by computers,” said Hemsworth.
So where does the actor fall on the tech-savvy scale? He can’t help but smile as he explained. “My character has a scene where he takes apart a number of phones and does numerous (impressive) things to them.
“So when I found out I was going to do this film, I got some old phones and took them apart. And that’s about all I did. I took them apart and couldn’t put them back together.”
Digital dexterity is not the Melbourne native’s strong point. But he is athletic. Before his L.A. adventure, the six-foot-three hunk was a professional surfer. He dropped the waves permanently as a teen to take on acting, paying his dues on Aussie TV, landing roles in Home and Away and McLeod’s Daughters.
He received praise for his recurring portrayal of the paraplegic Josh on the popular soap Neighbours before jetting to L.A. In the Hollywood action department, Hemsworth co-starred with Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Bruce Willis and Jet Li in The Expendables 2. And he’s sharing the big screen with Dwayne Johnson in Empire State, out at the end of this month.
He’s not all work and no play, however. After wrapping the drama Cut Back in and around Edmonton last month, Hemsworth enjoyed some vacation time with his significant other Cyrus, near his location shoot.
“Jasper,” he said of the Alberta mountain resort area and park, “is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to.”