While it must be an amazing experience to play one of the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having success and love from audiences heaped upon you, it’s probably pretty draining as an actor. Portraying the same character film after film must get tedious after a while, as actors are always looking to stretch themselves and explore fresh challenges.
We don’t know how many Marvel heroes feel this way, but Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, has revealed that he was suffering from boredom with the God of Thunder before the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok found a new way to approach the character. In a recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, the Australian star explained the thinking behind Ragnarok‘s radically different take on the Asgardian.
I had got pretty bored of myself as that character and so did [Taika Waititi, director], maybe a few people out there [too], so we thought, ‘Let’s do something different’.”
Now that he’s admitted this in one interview, it seems Hemsworth isn’t afraid to discuss his previous boredom on other platforms, too, as he went into a little bit more detail on the topic when chatting about Ragnarok with The Hollywood Star (via FemaleFirst):
“Taika Waititi, the director that came in, is a genius and has such a left-of-centre, wildly odd sense of humour. He said: ‘I don’t ever want to hear ‘Loki’ and ‘this madness’ again.’ And I said: ‘No, I’m done. I’ve said that a thousand times.’ And so anytime something felt familiar, we’d go the other way, throw it out of the window and start again. We may have pushed it too far; I don’t know. But it was a hell of a lot of fun and it’s going to be vastly different and unique to what we’ve done before.”
“That was our plan. To destroy him, destroy his world and everything he knows and everyone he loves, and just reinvent it. He happens to be on a planet where everyone else is pretty damn powerful too. So he’s kind of a regular guy in that sense. No one gives a damn if he’s the prince of Asgard or whatever. It doesn’t mean anything on this planet. We wanted to strip all that back and make him more relatable. I had also gotten kind of bored with how I was playing it. I wanted to do something different.”
Though Marvel loyalists have always been fond of the God of Thunder, and Hemsworth’s portrayal of him, it would be fair to say that the previous two Thor movies haven’t set audiences alight like the solo films of his Avengers teammates Iron Man and Captain America.
2013’s Thor: The Dark World, for example, earned $203 million domestically. Not too shabby on its own terms, but disappointing in the grand scheme of the MCU. It currently sits as the 12th highest-grossing film in the franchise out of the 16 released so far, bumped up only by its serviceable overseas gross.
Thankfully, then, Thor: Ragnarok looks like it’ll be a much bigger success when it arrives in theaters on November 3rd,
