Chris Hemsworth is quite happy about not playing the hero in George Miller’s upcoming “Mad Max: Fury Road” prequel movie “Furiosa.” The action tentpole casts Hemsworth as the villainous Dementus, a sociopathic warlord who steals the title character from her home as a child. It’s a far cry from his Marvel superhero Thor, who Hemsworth has played in four standalone movies and several more “Avengers” films. That’s precisely why the actor was hungry for the part.
“Yeah, it was a real departure, and it was nice. … I was about to say it was nice not to wear a cape, but… I did have a cape in this film,” Hemsworth recently told Entertainment Weekly. “And it’s red — or it becomes red eventually, as well. Theabsurdityof that.”
The “Furiosa” cape was “not intentional to be a comparison of Thor,” Hemsworth stressed, “but I found a wonderful departure to it — to play the villain, transform and inhabit a completely different physicality was a lot of fun. I loved it. And it was the real attraction.”
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The actor added that while he wanted to collaborate with George Miller, another selling point for “Furiosa” was the desire “to dirty it up and to be messy and ugly and violent and chaotic, rather than being in the somewhat predictable box of the hero in a superhero space. There’s a whole lot of rules that you have to stick to [with that]. With this, I could throw that out the window, which was nice.”
Hemsworth’s co-star Anya Taylor-Joy then asked him: “After years of capes, are they annoying?”
“Hate ’em. So impractical,” Hemsworth replied.
Hemsworth recently told Vanity Fair that “it’s been a long wait” to be able to get the chance to show off more than just his “muscly action guy” chops, which he’s done as Thor in the MCU and in movies such as Netflix’s “Extraction” franchise.
“Furiosa” opens in theaters May 24 from Warner Bros. after world premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. Head over to Entertainment Weekly’s website to read Hemsworth and Taylor-Joy’s full “Furiosa” cover story.
