Robert Downey Jr. shuts down Chris Hemsworth’s Thor complaints

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As he revs up a worldwide press tour for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Chris Hemsworth is getting candid about his time playing Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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In a Vanity Fair profile published this week, Hemsworth, 40, said he feels he let audiences down with the fourth standalone movie centring on Marvel’s God of Thunder.

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“I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he told the publication of his reaction to watching 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder. “I didn’t stick the landing.”

With a $760 million worldwide box office haul, Love and Thunder was a hit. But critics were less impressed with the film over its 2017 predecessor, Thor: Ragnarok.

Elsewhere, the Marvel star said he grew frustrated with the Asgardian hero’s role among the Avengers.

“Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team,” Hemsworth said. “I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, ‘Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun. What’s my character doing?’ It was always about, ‘You’ve got the wig on. You’ve got the muscles. You’ve got the costume. Where’s the lighting?’ Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”

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But Hemsworth’s Avengers co-star Robert Downey Jr. dismissed his complaints.

“First off, Thor as a character was super tricky to adapt — lots of implied limitations — but he and (director) Ken Branagh figured out how to transcend, make him somehow relatable but godlike,” Downey told the magazine. “Hemsworth is, in my opinion, the most complex psyche out of all us Avengers. He’s got wit and gravitas, but also such restraint, fire and gentleness.”

The Iron Man star went on to praise Hemsworth’s performance in Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame as a “formidable hat trick.”

A fifth Thor film has not been confirmed, but in a 2022 interview with Postmedia, Hemsworth said he was ready to keep playing the character for many years to come.

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“I love playing the character, and I have since the first day. As long as I get to keep working with wonderful directors and cast and crew and different writers and there’s an opportunity to do something different with the character, I’m down for anything. I’ll wait for the fans to say, ‘No thanks, we’ve had enough of you.’ But until then, I love it,” he said.

Hemsworth’s Thor director Taika Waititi also hinted the actor could hang around the MCU as long as he wants.

“If you look at the comics, there are versions of Thor where he’s thousands and thousands of years old. So Chris can do this for the rest of his life if he wants,” Waititi told Postmedia.

In the same Vanity Fair interview, Hemsworth also spoke about the revelation in the docuseries Limitless that he has a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease. The report made headlines in 2022, but Hemsworth told the outlet that quotes about him leaving Hollywood were taken out of context.

“It really kind of pissed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,” Hemsworth said. “No matter how much I said ‘This is not a death sentence,’ the story became that I have dementia and I’m reconsidering life and retiring and so on.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

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