Chris Hemsworth Drastically Changing Thor In Next Movie?
Chris Hemsworth says the bulking up is taking its toll, and he doesn't want to get quite as ripped next time he plays Thor.
If you’re going to look like a literal god, then it takes more than CGI and some cool costumes. The problem is if you’re Chris Hemsworth, then playing a Marvel god isn’t your only gig, which means working like mad to gain the bulk and muscle and then working like mad to lose it. The Thor franchise lead says he’s not willing to go to the same extreme lengths to play the son of Odin anymore.
As noted by MovieWeb, along with Thor: Love and Thunder‘s recent arrival on Disney+ came a new episode of Assembled sharing behind-the-scenes secrets and interviews, and in one such discussion Chris Hemsworth shares that the physical strain of gaining and losing his god-muscle is getting to be too much. “Each time I’ve played the character and put the muscle on and put the size on, and then lost it for something else and played another character, there’s muscle memory, and I used to say it sort of got easier each time,” Hemsworth says in the new Assembled episode. “This was particularly hard.”
Chris Hemsworth speculated that part of the reason his physical prep for the newest Thor movie was so much more punishing is that in for Love and Thunder the “the target weight” was the highest number he’d reached for yet. “Yeah, it was just exhausting,” Hemsworth recalled. “I don’t know, maybe I’m getting old, but things just started to hurt more.”
Of course, it isn’t as if fans should expect Chris Hemsworth to look like Jack Skellington any time soon. All of his upcoming roles that we know about are either action-oriented or would require him to still be fairly muscular and fit. Along with Hemsworth being expected to return for one or both of the upcoming Avengers sequels, by the end of the year he’ll be streaming on Netflix in Extraction 2. Then there’s the Mad Max prequel Furiosa and the as of yet untitled Hulk Hogan biopic.
Considering what we know about some of the things he does when playing Thor, it’s no wonder Chris Hemsworth wants to ease off a bit. Back in March, the actor’s personal trainer Luke Zocchi shared that whenever he knows he’ll be appearing shirtless on camera as Thor, Hemsworth undergoes a week-long regime of extreme hydration and then utter dehydration to make his muscles look “denser and harder.”
Zocchi said the week before the scene is shot, Chris Hemsworth begins increasing his water intake every day by at least a liter, until he’s drinking seven liters–or around 29 and a half cups–of water daily. Around lunch before the scene is shot, Hemsworth cuts off all water completely. Zocchi bluntly said “This is by no means a healthy thing to do, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else do this.”
It may be that Chris Hemsworth won’t have to worry for much longer about his pre-Thor appearance workout routine. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige recently talked about what we originally knew as the Avengers not really existing anymore. Appearing as Thor now in nine Marvel movies, voicing him in What If…?, in the 2011 video game Thor: God of Thunder, and even voicing his froggy variant Throg in Loki; it could be that Hemsworth’s time in Marvel is finally close to done.
