It seems quite unimaginable to imagine anyone other than Chris Hemsworth playing Thor in the MCU, though there was a time when the hammer-wielding actor was unsure of how his performance would be perceived by Marvel and fans alike.
While speaking with Australia’s Today, Hemsworth mentioned that he was unsure of his portrayal of the Avenger. “It was a lot of nostalgia in [Thor: Love and Thunder] for me, as it was with the last Avengers film. Ten, eleven years I’ve been doing it. The first time I played Thor was opposite Natalie Portman, and it was one of my first jobs, and I kept thinking I was going to get fired, or nothing was gonna work, or fans weren’t going to accept my version of the character. And if she thought I was any good, or I deserved to be there, or what have you.” Obviously, the fans accepted and he was welcome into the fandom with open arms after Thor.
But Love And Thunder hits theaters this summer, over a decade after Hemsworth was first introduced, so a lot has changed since then, and he knows it. “So ten years later to reunite — both of us, our lives have dramatically changed in many ways. Also, the characters have changed,” Hemsworth continued. Portman’s Jane is now her own, jacked-up Mighty Thor, who will presumably put the “love” in “love and thunder.”
The actor added, “I think Thor is in a very different place to where he was in the first film, and now we see Jane Foster come in, and has a whole bunch of superpowers and is a superhero herself. It made for some fun on-camera dynamics there.” If “fun dynamic” is anything even close to Portman and Hemsworth beating up some bad guys with some cheesy ’80s music in the background, then it should be a success.
Thor: Love And Thunder opens in theaters on July 8th.