The director Chris Hemsworth never believed he’d work with: “I missed my window”
Outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chris Hemsworth has had a very odd career.
He’s been a part of other big franchises – Star Trek, Men in Black, Transformers – but never in a particularly impactful manner. Unlike his fellow Avengers, he rarely strays into dramatic territory. He’s seemingly quite content to just keep making big, often forgettable studio movies. Fair enough, Chris, fair enough.
One franchise movie in which he did actually make a splash was 2024’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Hemsworth starred opposite Anya Taylor-Joy’s titular character as Dementus, a charismatic but ruthless warlord who roams the post-apocalyptic wasteland, wreaking havoc and looking fabulous in the process. The Thor star was by far and away the MVP of the whole movie, providing a performance that will go down as one of the great villainous turns of the age. It also gave him a rare opportunity to use his native Australian accent.
The blonde demigod might have had a very specific reason for bringing his A-game to this project. Speaking to The Direct, Hemsworth revealed that working with director George Miller was on his career bucket list. It was also something he never expected to actually do.
“I think I asked my manager years ago about Mad Max and then Tom Hardy had already been cast,” he recalled. “I sort of wondered, ‘I missed my window.’ And then the opportunity came…”
The movie Hemsworth is referring to is, of course, Mad Max: Fury Road, which was released a full 30 years after the ‘Road Warrior’s last outing, and was Miller’s long-awaited return to the action genre after years making strange family comedies, but there was just one problem – Mel Gibson. The original Max was now persona non grata in Hollywood, so Miller needed a new hero, and among the names considered were Eric Bana, Heath Ledger, and Armie Hammer, who would have caused the director the exact same issues just a few years later. The weirdest potential star was Eminem, whom Miller was initially very keen on.
In the end, Tom Hardy was chosen, despite not being Australian, a rapper, or a maniac, and he spent most of the film’s runtime silently brooding, barely uttering a word in between getting strapped to the front of a car and blasting bad guys with a shotgun, but his performance received widespread acclaim. The whole movie did, in fact, pick up awards across the board and introduced an entirely new generation of fans to Mr Rockastansky.
It’s easy to understand why Hemsworth was initially upset at missing out on Mad Max, but with the power of hindsight, it was the best thing for him, since even though Hardy did a great job in that movie, he couldn’t have played Dementor, a character that Hemsworth absolutely nailed, and for my money, is the best thing across both pictures.
He described Furiosa as the movie he was “most proud of” making, so he clearly got over his initial disappointment, and probably would have liked the film to have made a bit more money, but we can’t have everything.
