Chris Hemsworth is tired of all the Marvel-bashing — from both acclaimed directors and some of his own costars.
Without naming any names, Hemsworth, 40, slammed actors who have previously starred in Marvel movies then gone on to complain about the films. “It’s, like, ‘They’re films that are successful — put me in one. Oh, mine didn’t work? I’ll bash them,’” the Furiosa star told The Times of London in an interview published Sunday, May 12.
Hemsworth went on to note that he got his own start working on the Australian soap opera Home and Away. “And it used to bother me when actors would later talk about the show with guilt or shame,” he added. “Humility goes a long way.”
The Thor actor also noted that he learned some valuable lessons in his soap opera days. “One of the older actors on Home and Away said, ‘We don’t get paid to make the good lines sound good, but to make the bad ones work.’ That stuck with me,” he recalled. “But hey, it’s all a lesson. And if I ever went back to [Thor] I’d wonder how we could change it again.”
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While Hemsworth didn’t call out anyone specific, several stars who’ve appeared in superhero movies — including those produced by Marvel — have publicly spoken out disliking the process. Christian Bale, who starred alongside Hemsworth in 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, complained about the “monotony” of acting in front of a green screen.
“You’ve got good people. You’ve got other actors who are far more experienced at it than me. Can you differentiate one day from the next? No. Absolutely not,” Bale, 50, told GQ in October 2022. “You have no idea what to do. I couldn’t even differentiate one stage from the next.”
Hemsworth also expressed his disappointment with the way film icons like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola talk about superhero movies. Scorsese, 81, has said that Marvel movies are “not cinema,” while Coppola, 85, has described them as “despicable.”
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“It felt harsh,” Hemsworth said on Sunday. “And it bothers me, especially from heroes. It was an eye-roll for me, people bashing the superhero space. Those guys had films that didn’t work too — we all have. When they talked about what was wrong with superheroes, I thought, ‘Cool, tell that to the billions who watch them.’ Were they all wrong?”
Hemsworth also took issue with the idea that superhero franchises are the only reason that the movie industry has changed so much in the past decade.
“Cinema-going did not change because of superheroes, but because of smartphones and social media,” he argued. “Superhero films actually kept people in the cinemas during that transition and now people are coming back. So they deserve a little more appreciation.”
