Over the past decade, Chris Hemsworth has built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s hardest working – and most successful – superstars. And with a new TV series lined up, a blockbuster film in the works and promo tour on the way, things showed little sign of slowing down anytime soon.
Earlier this year, Chris Hemsworth, the world-famous movie star, heartthrob, superhero, Sexiest Man Alive (2014), world’s second highest-paid actor (2019), husband, brother, father, entrepreneur, philanthropist, Western Bulldogs fan and Norse God of Thunder, suddenly found himself in an unusual position. He was pretty much like everyone else in the world. At home. Growing restless. And worried about what was going to happen next.
This was towards the end of March and the shutdown was so complete, it was as though the Earth itself had stopped spinning.
Shops closed, jobs gone, chaos in virtually every country.
“It’s probably the first time in about 10 years that I don’t know what I’m doing for the next six months,” says Hemsworth, his voice that same gruff baritone you hear on-screen. “I don’t have it all mapped out. To some degree, it’s nice not to have a schedule, but the unknown and the uncertainty is intimidating.”
Hemsworth, of course, was not really like everyone else. He knows how lucky he is. He might have been at home along with the rest of the country, but the place he was confined to was the sprawling hilltop property near Byron Bay that he, his wife, the Spanish actress Elsa Pataky, their three children and the family’s pet dog Sunny have been living in since the end of last year.
It is a delicate time to be a celebrity. In April, billionaire David Geffen deleted his Instagram account after posting an image of his $200m, 452ft superyacht Rising Sun, presumably taken by a drone.
“Isolated in the Grenadines,” his caption read. “I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.” Somehow the well wishes did not go down as intended.
The previous month, Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot and a bevy of famous friends delivered a less-than-rousing version of John Lennon’s Imagine (“Imagine no possessions”), while others have inspired little more than derision for posting ‘stay home’ messages from the confines of their expansive living rooms, vast country-style kitchens or manicured gardens.
It didn’t help that a video Jennifer Lopez uploaded to social media urging people to #staysafe revealed her LA mansion bore an uncanny resemblance to the one featured in Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho’s Oscar-winning film about unchecked greed and class privilege. Hemsworth, notoriously private at the best of times, knows better than to make himself an easy target.
“We’re very fortunate,” he acknowledges of his family’s situation. “But we’re here at home and attempting to homeschool the kids, which is a feat in itself. They’re better students than I am a teacher, to be honest.”
As the shutdown hit, Hemsworth was in the middle of filming National Geographic series Limitless, in which he would endure a range of mental and physical challenges with the aim of living longer.
He was also set to promote Extraction, a movie he filmed back in 2018. “I love that film so much,” he says of the action thriller, which is out now on Netflix.
“So I was excited to get out there and sell it to the world.”
Then there’s the fourth instalment of the franchise that has made him a household name, Thor: Love and Thunder. It is still set to commence filming in Sydney this August, though the current crisis leaves pre-production in doubt.
He knows he is far better off than most – demand for nationwide unemployment services peaked so quickly in March, Centrelink’s website crashed – but for Hemsworth, the forced break feels like it’s been a long time coming.
“I’ve spent probably 15 years in what felt like a marathon, a constant workload,” he says. “So much of my energy has been geared towards that, and then having kids at the same time, I’ve been constantly trying to find the balance. I’ve really yearned for more stillness and felt a definite need to slow down. Not having a schedule in front of me has made me reposition my values and what’s important, and I think most people are having those kinds of thoughts right now.”
Hemsworth always wanted to be an actor. He remembers watching Legends of the Fall – the Oscar-winning historical epic starring Brad Pitt and Sir Anthony Hopkins – and being awestruck by Pitt.
His range, his charisma on-screen. Then, after taking a course at Sydney’s Screenwise film and television school, Hemsworth knew he couldn’t do anything else. “Overnight, it became my obsession,” he says.
But he had another motivation beyond wanting to be the next Brad Pitt.
Hemsworth went to school in Heathmont, in eastern Melbourne, but his family later moved to Bulman, a small cattle station town of less than 300 people in the Northern Territory. Things were not easy, and he soon began to dream of making it big.
“We had grown up with very little money,” he says. “My parents struggled with bills and financial pressures and I thought if I’m an actor, I can get us out of it, I can take care of my family.”
So began a frantic work pace that, until this recent period of forced respite, has not let up in over a decade. But in addition to chasing success, he was also driven by fear. Fear that if he didn’t keep saying yes, keep taking on more projects, things could slow down as quickly as they took off.
“You need to have an obsessive approach,” he says, of working in the film industry, “just like anything where the odds are stacked against you and it’s a one-in-a-million chance that you’re going to get your foot in the door. But once you are on that train, not a day goes by where you don’t think it’s going to be taken away, all of a sudden.”
But years of running at full pace had begun to take their toll. And even though he’s clearly in a position where he can take his foot off the pedal – Hemsworth made well over $100m last year, alone – old habits are hard to break.
“You still have this fear and anxiety programmed in you that it’s all going to slip away,” he says. “But I must admit that once I had paid off my parents’ house and taken care of my family, I had a moment where I thought: what now? What’s driving this?
“Every job I’d take, every time I’d go off on these extended trips, it got harder and harder. For a little while you don’t think the kids notice and then you realise they do. I absolutely want to continue to make films that I’m proud of, but that can also wait. Now what’s more important is my kids are at an age I don’t want to miss. And I’d hate to look back in 20 years and go, ‘Right, let’s get to work as a parent’ and I’ve missed it all.”
In 2014, Hemsworth had begun filming the second Avengers film, Age of Ultron, when he and Pataky bought their Byron Bay property for $7m. They had been living in LA for years, but this would mark the start of his family’s move out of the showbiz epicentre and back home to Australia.
“You’re a little bit too much in the eye of the storm when you’re living in Hollywood,” he says. “Living in Australia, it’s also easier to detach myself from work – and you get a bit more leeway to let a few emails and phone calls slide on by.”
All going according to plan, Thor: Love and Thunder will come out next year. By then, Hemsworth will have played the title character for a full decade – it’s easy to forget he was just 25 when he was cast in Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 original.
At the time, he had a handful of credits to his name and while he was already reasonably famous in Australia – he appeared on the local version of Dancing with the Stars in 2006 – Hemsworth was a virtual unknown in the US. He had auditioned unsuccessfully for a role in X-Men and also for the lead in G.I. Joe, a part that ultimately went to Channing Tatum. Hemsworth began to think his career might never take off.
“I had seven or eight call backs and I thought one of those was going to land,” he says. “But then neither of them did and all of a sudden I thought: this is it, I’ve missed it again. But then Thor came along. If I had got one of those previous roles I wouldn’t have got Thor.”
As Hemsworth’s first proper blockbuster role, his tenure as the God of Thunder neatly charts his transition from obscurity to one of the most famous actors on the planet. But between the original franchise and the Avengers films, the next instalment will be Hemsworth’s ninth outing in the role. The money is good, of course, but he began to find he was losing sight of what he wanted out of his career.
“I felt a lack of creativity,” he says. “But that was less about whether I was typecast – it was, ‘Is this all I can do?’”
In 2017, he decided to mix things up and took an unexpected role as a murderous cult leader in neo-noir thriller Bad Times at the El Royale. The film was well received when it hit screens, making a tidy $52m at the box office, and it could scarcely have been a cleaner break from the big-budget productions that Hemsworth is best known for. Last year’s Avengers: Endgame, by comparison, made more than $4.6bn worldwide.
“It reignited my love for acting,” he says of Bad Times at the El Royale. “I got to do something that wasn’t about special effects and action sequences. When it becomes too familiar, it’s very easy for me to say, ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’”
There was another element that made Hemsworth pick up the hammer again. Kiwi director Taika Waititi joined the franchise with 2017’s Thor: Ragnorak, and won praise for injecting more humour into the series, which – in an era when audiences are expecting to see more vulnerability from their on-screen male heroes – was at risk of feeling outdated.
“He’s insanely fun,” says Hemsworth, of working with the director. “But don’t mistake that child-like, frantic energy for someone who isn’t prepared. That’s quite a unique combination, that he has the ability to, through humour, put you at ease, but is also armed with all the knowledge that a director needs to lead you through the process. And it came at a time when I desperately wanted there to be more humour to the character.”
This year, Waititi also won a Best Screenplay Oscar for Jojo Rabbit, his dark WWII comedy about a German boy who finds his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their attic.
“I was certainly happy for him when he won and it was a pretty special moment,” says Hemsworth, before admitting he hadn’t been paying quite as much attention to the awards as he might once have done. “I hadn’t actually seen any of the other films he was nominated against – I hadn’t seen much of anything. Living here I was like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s Oscars season’. I’d been pretty out of the loop.”
Hemsworth and Pataky have three children, a seven-year-old daughter and five-year-old twin boys. Although filming schedules can take him away from them for months at a time, he likes the fact they’re now at an age where they can enjoy his movies. Even if they’re not convinced he’s the superhero the rest of the world sees him as.
“I get a kick out of it when they actually enjoy my movies,” he says. “But there’s also an equal share of eye-rolls – I couldn’t be less cool in their eyes. It’s nature’s way of telling me the truth. You can fall into a false sense of self-importance on a film set, where you feel you’re special, so it’s good to remind yourself that it’s not the case. And kids certainly drive that home.”
Hemsworth has been thinking a lot about the fate of the world lately, and not just because of the current crisis. His brother Liam, who also moved to Byron Bay earlier this year, lost his home in the California fires in 2018, and the Australian bushfires could have threatened Chris’ own place.
“The whole place felt like a tinderbox,” he says. “It makes me realise how little control we have over these things, whether it’s the bushfires or coronavirus. They don’t discriminate, we’re all vulnerable to it.”
In early January, Hemsworth took to Instagram and shared a video with his 40 million followers. “Hey there guys,” he said, speaking directly into the camera.
“As you’re well aware, the bushfires in Australia have caused massive devastation… we’re really still in the thick of it here and there’s plenty of challenging times ahead.”
He called for an urgent need for donations to help those still battling the flames – the country would continue to burn until the beginning of March, when more than 240 days of active bushfires finally came to an end – and announced that he was personally donating a million dollars to the cause.
It’s easy for celebrities to throw money around, of course. But last year, Hemsworth also took part in the Global Climate Strike with his family, and he has been vocal in asking world leaders to do more to combat climate change – he told this magazine in 2017 that Donald Trump was “full of shit on every level” when it came to the issue, which is hard to argue with.
“It’s no longer this distant, looming threat,” he says. “We’re seeing it play out in real time, on our doorstep. Our relationship to Earth and to society and each other, we’re getting a real shake-up. You start to rethink your values and it becomes clearer what’s important.
“You could not have felt a larger sense that climate change is real and it’s time to do something about it. But then it’s off the news and it’s out of sight, out of mind. That’s what scares me because unless things are right in front of us, do we have the energy to focus on it before it’s too late?”
That’s what worries Hemsworth most. That things will be left for future generations, for his own children, to deal with – and by then, the opportunity may have already been lost.
“They know more about climate change than we do,” he says. “But it’s also disheartening that we couldn’t have righted the ship. To see that kids are striking to get adults’ attention – we should be embarrassed about that. I’m inspired by them, but I’m also disappointed that this is what we’ve left for them. The whole scientific community is in agreement, so to deny it at this point is not just naïve, it’s also irresponsible and dangerous.”
It’s a difficult time to think about the future. And it’s easy to pretend Hemsworth has all the answers, that he’s the superhero we all need right now. But it’s also easy to dismiss him as yet another sanctimonious celebrity, preaching to the masses from his mansion, oblivious to the way normal people live. The reality is that neither of those things is entirely true.
Hemsworth is not asking us to believe he knows what comes next. He might be one of the most famous men on the planet, but for the next few months, at least, he’s really just another guy at home with his family, trying to get on with life. Hoping for the best, like everyone else.