Chris Hemsworth rides up on a horse, reins in one hand, face shining in the Australian sun. We’re on a pristine stretch of beach near his house. Our last gallop took me by surprise, my feet flapping wildly out of their stirrups, and Hemsworth wants to make sure I feel safe. He tells me to steer my horse into the Pacific if I don’t know how else to stop. This gallant little scene captures the fantasy of Hemsworth: pop culture’s sunny, reliable hero. But the best stuff about him as a person—the funny, messy, human stuff—lives beneath the glossy surface. Later, he’ll say of our rollicking morning on the beach, “I had a moment of, Oh, I can catch her if she falls off. That’ll be good for the story. And my next thought was, No, you’ll fall over before she will, and she’ll have to catch you.”
Hemsworth and his family live in Byron Bay, a surf town just south of Australia’s Gold Coast where men walk barefoot into nice restaurants and all the women have long, sun-streaked hair and not even the old people look old. Everyone is fit and beautiful and drinks green juice, and maybe it would all be alienating if people weren’t also so warm and kind. When I tell my hotel receptionist that I’m in town to meet Hemsworth, she smiles approvingly. “He’s one of us,” she says. “Just like any of the other surfers down at the beach. Doesn’t carry on or put on airs. Looks like my mate’s brother, you know?”
Jacket and T-shirt by Giorgio Armani; pants by Brunello Cucinelli; belt by The Society Archive.Photograph by Gregory Harris; styled by Tony Irvine.
I meet Hemsworth at his house, where he waits for me in the driveway, his bare feet immune to the hot pavement. He’s got the whole afternoon to talk until he has to leave to pick up his three kids from school. In person, the most striking thing about the actor isn’t his impressive height, or his surfer’s tan, or even his Popsicle-blue eyes that electrically charged the Marvel universe for more than a decade. It’s his lack of slickness. There’s nothing oily or impatient or rehearsed about the man. Saturday Night Live star Cecily Strong once called Hemsworth her favorite host because nobody had expected Thor to be “the cool jock that just wants to hang out with the gay theater kids.”
His home is so full of life. He and his wife of 14 years, the Spanish actor Elsa Pataky, are parents to an 11-year-old girl and twin 9-year-old boys. The family also has an enormous fish tank, three dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, and donkeys, as well as the horses they keep at their nearby farm. What used to be an art room for the kids now has a paper with “REPTIEL” written in Magic Marker bubble letters taped to the door for the lizard, axolotl, and snake named Shoelace. Hemsworth’s daughter, India, keeps birds in her bedroom’s large, enclosed balcony, one of whom likes to sit on her shoulder out on the sofa. Also wandering around the property is a cat, which his family surprised him with. Hemsworth isn’t a cat guy, but he even less wants to be the guy who makes his kids return a creature once they’ve fallen in love.
The family moved to Byron Bay in 2015 to be close to his parents, who live just up the hill, but also to escape the head trip of Hollywood, which Hemsworth summarizes as follows: “I’m sick of my face. Why isn’t it on a billboard? I’m too famous. Why are there paparazzi here? Wait, why aren’t there any paparazzi here?” He pauses. “Well, which do you want, Chris?” He’s prone to that toxic seesawing of anxiety and reproach, and it makes him so tired. Of himself, mostly.
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This may be the most surprising thing about Hemsworth: For all his hunky appeal, he’s also deeply reflective, ambivalent, and complicated. We talk for hours out on his pool deck, overlooking the beach, two of his dogs asleep at our feet. He picks at the calluses on his hands like worry beads, ruminating over his answers with care. At 40, he feels like he’s at a crossroads, unsure of how to best navigate life, and—careers being like horses—what, if anything, is in his control.
This month, Hemsworth stars in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the hotly anticipated prequel to 2015’s Oscar-winning box office smash Fury Road set in the same blighted wasteland. Alongside Anya Taylor-Joy’s titular character, Hemsworth plays Dementus, the charismatic leader of a biker horde. He disappears so completely into the role—which intentionally blunts the Marvel of him with a prosthetic Apolline nose and brown contact lenses—that his own friends didn’t recognize him in the trailer. Hemsworth’s Dementus, however full of cheeky verve, has been ruined by deprivation and loss; he is a man with ash for a soul who now worships only the god of survival. Tellingly, it is the actor’s favorite role since he starred in Ron Howard’s 2013 race car drama, Rush. “Ron took me out of that typecast space of the muscly action guy and let me play a character with complications and darkness,” he says. “I remember thinking at the time, Oh, this is going to change everything.” It took a decade, and working with Miller, to feel fed as deeply. “Yeah,” says Hemsworth, “it’s been a long wait.”
After a year at home catching his breath and nursing a back injury, Hemsworth wants off the bench. “The one side of my brain tells me, Oh, you took too much time off and now the train’s passed you by,” he says. “The more rational mind is like, You’ve turned down a lot of stuff too—big action films where there wasn’t a solid script.” But he also wants stillness. He wants work outside the action lane and to be taken seriously by directors like Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg. But he also thinks he owes the audience another Thor after what felt like a whiff with Thor: Love and Thunder. He wants to let himself take his craft more seriously. But he doesn’t want to be “an overly self-important, pretentious wanker.” And he wants it known, once and for all, that he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, nor has he quit the business.
Two years ago, as part of the National Geographic docuseries Limitless, Hemsworth underwent genetic testing that revealed he carried two copies of the APOE4 gene. The startling news—which is not a diagnosis but a marker of risk that one of my daughters happens to share—coincided with planned time off, and some headlines conflated the two incorrectly. “It really kind of pissed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,” he says. “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.” His face relaxes into a smile, because that’s how he was raised, in a family acutely aware of life’s fragility, so best not to take any of it too seriously. “I did read a really funny comment at the bottom of one article: ‘I hope Chris forgets he’s retiring and comes back.’”
When Leonie Hemsworth’s 23-year-old son moved to Los Angeles in 2007, she gave him a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! “Pack your bags, off you go,” she told him. “If it doesn’t work out, the couch will always be here.”
Chris crawled at four and a half months, took his first steps at 10 and a half months, and insisted he could swim when he was just two and a half years old. “He scared a lot of people because he looked like he was drowning,” she said in a toast at Hemsworth’s 40th birthday party not long ago, the text of which she shared with me. “He had a weird otter kind of swim where he’d come up for air in between bouts of drowning, but he wouldn’t let anyone help him. He had to do it on his own.” Hemsworth’s superpower, though it may have looked like a curse from the shoreline, was tenacity.
When they weren’t outside catching giant lace monitor lizards or paddling out for waves, the three Hemsworth boys—older brother Luke and Hunger Games star Liam—grew up watching movies like Legends of the Fall on a loop. “There’s never been a more beautiful man onscreen,” Hemsworth says of Brad Pitt’s tortured rancher, Tristan Ludlow. He rewatched the movie with his wife when she was pregnant with the twins. “Is this not the coolest character in the world?” he said to her. “I think one of our kids needs to be named Tristan.” (Their other son, Sasha, is named after a stuntman friend.)
Hemsworth wanted to be an actor because he wanted to be like Pitt in Legends, Patrick Swayze in Point Break, or Robert De Niro in Heat. His brother Luke had found work on a TV show, and that seemed like fun. “Then it just became a complete obsession,” he says. Before coming to America, he spent three years on an Australian soap, playing a hunk. “I always felt like, Oh, I’m just being kind of put over here in the corner: ‘Yeah, just take your shirt off and go over there, and now you’re working at the gym and now you’re working at the bar.’”