Chris Hemsworth shares reason he blames himself for Thor: Love and Thunder failure

Chris Hemsworth has addressed his performance in Thor: Love and Thunder, blaming himself for what he believes didn’t live up to fan expectations.

The 40-year-old Australian, who’s led the Marvel franchise as the titular superhero – based on the Norse god – since 2011’s Thor, returned for the fourth installment, Love and Thunder, in 2022.

Directed by Taika Waititi, who took over the film series with 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, the action comedy welcomed back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster, Thor’s ex-girlfriend. Together, the two must defeat Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), before he succeeds in slaying all the gods.

While the film was mostly well-received by critics and fans – it currently sits at 76 per cent on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes – Hemsworth can’t shake the feeling that he “didn’t stick the landing”.

“I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he told Vanity Fair in a new cover story. “I didn’t stick the landing.”

Although Hemsworth is grateful for the opportunity to play Thor for more than a decade, he told the publication that he’s grown frustrated with the character.

“I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, ‘Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun. What’s my character doing?’ It was always about, ‘You’ve got the wig on. You’ve got the muscles. You’ve got the costume. Where’s the lighting?’ Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”

His latest comments on Love and Thunder echo the remarks he made to British GQ last summer.

“I cringe and laugh equally at it. I think we just had too much fun. It just became too silly,” he said in 2023. “It’s always hard being in the centre of it and having any real perspective… I love the process, it’s always a ride. But you just don’t know how people are going to respond.”

Despite some of the negative reviews that felt the film’s goofiness was overdone, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey found the movie to be “a rare Marvel film that remembers its main audience are kids”.

It’s “a delightful sequel motor-powered by goofy self-awareness and childlike imagination,” she wrote in her four-star review of the movie.

Elsewhere in the Vanity Fair interview, Hemsworth responded to headlines claiming Alzheimer’s was making him “quit Hollywood”

Two years ago, the actor underwent genetic testing during the National Geographic docuseries, Limitless, where he found out that he carried two copies of the APOE4 gene. Carrying the gene does not mean that Hemsworth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but that he is at risk for it.

“It really kind of pissed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,” he told the outlet about the headlines, which were not true. “No matter how much I said: ‘This is not a death sentence,’ the story became that I have dementia and I’m reconsidering life and retiring and so on.”

Up next, Hemsworth stars opposite Anya Taylor-Joy in George Miller’s prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road titled Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which will be released in cinemas on 24 May.