In chatting with the L.A. Times'
Hero Complex, actor Chris Hemsworth, star of Marvel's much-anticipated
Thor film, speaks on the many inspirations that influenced his approach in wielding the Mighty Avenger's title weapon, Mjolnir. Also elaborating on the "movement" approach to a God of Thunder, check out what he has to say.
“It’s hard to know where to start when you come in and you get the hammer handed to you,” Hemsworth said, adding that he didn’t want to come off as a lumberjack or an ax murderer onscreen. ”I was working on ‘Red Dawn’ and talked to Tom Cruise [whose son Connor is in the movie] and he asked me, ‘Have you been doing sword-fight training and all of that to get ready [for 'Thor']?’ — he has an interest after ‘The Last Samurai’ — and I said, ‘No, I haven’t, because it’s not really a sword, it’s a hammer.’ We talked about how odd that is.”
On the approach of actually standing & fighting with the hammer...
“It’s not the most practical thing, when you first come to it, to think of a giant, flat hammer as a weapon,” Hemsworth said. “Realistically, it wouldn’t be weighted right for anyone to use it if the handle was only so long. So the main thing coming in was to make the hammer an extension of Thor. We had to develop a style of movement that was singular, really, to this character. We looked at Mike Tyson and that very low, powerful, very aggressive stance — a big-shoulder, big-hip stance that suggests coiled strength. We had a movement guy come in too, a guy named Paradox Pollack, and we worked together a lot.”
On meeting actor, creature & movement choreographer, and "Laufey" stunt double Paradox Pollack...
“I met him on ‘Star Trek,’” Hemsworth said of Pollack. “He was teaching all the people who were playing aliens how to move around. How do you get that job? He’s a fascinating guy. He’s got a circus background and acrobatics and he was a real help. He came in on this and he had read every ‘Thor’ comic book and he had a lot to show me about the hands and postures and these poses that evoke the comic book character and then how, as an actor, you could do some of those things to put it on the screen. He had this idea too of this electricity, this energy, that’s surrounding Thor. There’s an aura of thunder and lighting and energy around him, and if you start with that, then there’s a way you can move that kind of fits with that. And it affects the relation to everybody else, the way he interacts; if this exists and it extends to out here then you wouldn’t stand that close to a 9-foot monster. It was all very helpful to me.”
With the well-received release overseas, look for
Thor in theaters worldwide May 6!
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