Chris Hemsworth has waited a long time to show the world Asgard’s ass in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Speaking to Variety at the Thor: Love and Thunder red carpet premiere, Hemsworth revealed just how much he had anticipated letting Thor bare it all on camera since his 2011 Marvel Cinematic Universe debut. “It was 10 years in the making that scene — kind of a dream of mine,” he said. “The first time I played Thor I took my shirt off and I thought, ‘You know what’s gonna sweeten this… a decade from now it’s all gonna come off.'”
The naked Thor scene, though pixelated in Love and Thunder‘s second trailer, was something both Hemsworth and director Taika Waititi pushed hard to include. As Waititi put it, “My whole thing was like, Chris works so hard, you’ve gotta show it off. Don’t cover it up with all these suits and the cape and stuff, it’s not fair!” Hemsworth also conceded that, while his butt previously appeared in the 2013 sports biopic Rush, “In a Marvel film, it was a very large screen, it was a very big pair of cheeks, and, I don’t know, I had seen it before.”
Hemsworth first appeared as Thor in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the same name, then reprised his role a year later for Marvel’s landmark blockbuster The Avengers alongside co-star Tom Hiddleston as Loki. Since then, Hemsworth has played Thor in five more MCU films, as well as voiced an alternate version of him in Disney+’s What If…? animated series. The Marvel films’ success also helped advance his acting career, bringing him roles in popular series like Ghostbusters and Men in Black while headlining projects like Netflix’s action blockbuster Extraction, the streaming platform’s most-viewed original film. The actor recently completed filming Extraction 2 and is currently working on Furiosa, a Mad Max: Fury Road prequel about the origins of Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, now played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
Thor: Love and Thunder will not only reunite Thor with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Vakyrie, and Korg, but also Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, now wielding his hammer Mjolnir as the Mighty Thor. The film also sets a record for Hemsworth as the first time a MCU actor has received four solo films, though executive producer Brian Chapel implied that someone else might hit that milestone in the future. Joining the returning cast is Russell Crowe as the Greek god Zeus — whose scenes on Mount Olympus teased the naked Thor moment — and Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher, an alien who seeks to eliminate all known gods from the Marvel universe.
Directed by Taika Waititi, Thor: Love and Thunder premieres July 8.
Source: Variety