“There was no faking what I was going through,” he says. “I tore ligaments in my ankle, I hurt my back, I was training nonstop for both Thor and different episodes, it was full-on. But there’s an authenticity to it. If we’d shot in that three-week period, it wouldn’t have turned out that way. The running joke between me and my mates was, we were gonna call it Limited, ’cause we were capping out,” he laughs.
When I ask which challenge was the hardest, he says the “Shock” episode, when he surfs the Norwegian Arctic, followed by swimming 250 meters in 37-degree water. “It was insane,” he remembers. “Halfway through, my brain felt like it was being stabbed by a thousand knives.” But there are lighter moments, too, like when Chris pulls Luke and Liam into a polar plunge and soccer match. “We used to go on surfing trips together and this felt similar, but in a place so removed from everything. We were wide-eyed and fascinated.” In Hemsworth’s eyes, he and his brothers will always be 12, 18 and 21 to each other. “That period to me, just finishing high school, Luke’s already finished, Liam’s coming up, when we were our most active and surfing and talking about acting and all the things we wanted to do, is so vivid in my mind. As we get older and we’re supposed to be men, when the three of us hang out, it feels like we’re back there, kids still.”
Which begs the question: If the bros took on his Love and Thunder castmates Christian Bale, Russell Crowe and Tom Hiddleston in a three-on-three, who’d win? “Bale, I think, can play soccer. Crowe is rugby, so I think we’d be able to take him. But Hiddleston’s a distance runner, he’d run circles around us,” he laughs.
Cruise Control
Looking back, Limitless put everything into perspective, he says, even an afterlife he can’t comprehend. “It was the most beautiful appreciation for life and then a real hope that there is some sort of continuation. I was like, ‘Man, I hope there’s some version of all this continuing in any shape or form, I don’t know what or when or how.’”
It was also a wake-up call. “Hey, soak it up, enjoy it, ’cause the clock’s ticking. I like the fact that it scared the shit out of me at times, and now also has become a friendly reminder,” he says. “You hear it all the time: It’s been right in front of us the whole time. The now, the moment, the present, it’s right in front of us, and we’re so distracted and caught up in these future goals, or past experiences, that we’re not appreciating what’s right here.”
He pauses, taking in his own words. “And that was the moment where I thought, once I’m done with the next run of films, which are taking me through to now, I’m having some time off.” When he reemerges, he’d like to dig into a smaller, contained drama or love story, without all the special effects. But don’t mark your calendar. “I’m gonna throw my phone away and remove myself from all of it for a while,” he says. “I’m not saying years and years, but I would love a little distance to soak up some time with my family, my kids.”
So while fans get their next fix when Extraction 2 hits screens next spring, you’ll find Hemsworth at home in the coastal suburb of Broken Head, noshing on his favorite steak, bacon and cheese pie and almond latte from Suffolk Bakery, reading The Untethered Soul, a book he heard about on Russell Brand’s podcast, and barbecuing with friends and family. He may even slip into a local music festival in disguise. And before the rest of the world wakes up, he’ll be catching clean five- to six-footers along Byron Bay’s coastline, as the sun rises from the easternmost point on the planet. “I can just sit at peace, in the stillness of those early hours,” he says. “I’ll send you a photo of it from my roof.”
Wait—wasn’t he chucking his phone? “Ah, right, I’ll take it with old-fashioned film then,” he promises with a laugh. We both know he won’t, but an image instantly develops anyway: all 6-foot-3 of him, floating in the waves, surrendering to whatever the hell this is, just like his tattoo, as the circle of sun shoots a gold triangle over the ocean from a razor-sharp horizon line, its own trippy sacred geometry.
