ALL eyes will be on Thor star Chris Hemsworth as he joins racegoers at Flemington. But despite being one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors, the surfer from Phillip Island is as grounded as ever.
THE first thing Hollywood star Chris Hemsworth does whenever he jets into town is head straight to the beach at Phillip Island for a surf.
He may have hit the big time with his role in Thor but underneath the A-list glitz and glamour of his new lifestyle is just a regular guy who longs to feel the sand of Cape Woolamai beneath his toes.
“We have a place in LA and it’s great but Australia is home — it’s where my friends and family are,” Hemsworth tells Weekend in an exclusive interview.“I usually try to get to Phillip Island for a surf. It’s whereI grew up. I get straight off the plane and head straight into the water.”
In Melbourne to attend AAMI Victoria Derby Day as a guest of Johnnie Walker, Hemsworth acknowledges a day at the races will be a slightly different experience than when he last went to the Melbourne Cup.
“I’m only here for the weekend to go to the races but it seemed like a great opportunity to catch up with friends and family,” he says. “I have been a few times but not for several years now. It’s a really great atmosphere.I will probably put a bet on at some point — that’s what you do at the races. But I wouldn’t say I’m a betting man. I don’t do it regularly. For me it’s more about the atmosphere of the whole event. That’s what I enjoy.”
Hemsworth laughs that he’s sure to receive a few jokes about Thor from over-excited punters in the Birdcage but says he’s grown accustomed to being associated with the role that’s made him famous. And with Marvel last month announcing another Thor in 2017 and two more Avengers movies in 2018-19, Hemsworth has clearly come to terms with growing those long blond locks for a few more years yet.
“It happens a bit but I have grown used to it and it’s always positive,” he says. “It’s all good. Thor has really opened doors for me. I’m really grateful.
“I had no idea that it would be this big when I signed up. I knew what they were intending it to be. Playing a demigod with the hammer and a red cape did seem a bit daunting but with Kenneth Branagh directing I knew I was in safe hands.”
But not everyone is a fan of Hemsworth’s Thor costume. The character’s horned helmet and Fabio-inspired tresses have made many a comic book fan go weak at the knees but, he says, the look isn’t exactly winning over the people closest to him.
Hemsworth, 31, laughs that his six-year-old daughter, India, insists he removes his Thor costume before she’ll even contemplate playing with him.
“My two youngest are so young, they don’t even know who I am,” he jokes. “My daughter, with the Thor costume especially, she used to be like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a bit different’, and she was happy that I pick her up and swung her around. Now she’s like, ‘Off, off’ because it’s all bulky and metal and pulls at the wig. She doesn’t like the look.”
Hemsworth and his young family have just spent the past few weeks enjoying the sunshine in Byron Bay, where he recently splashed out on a luxury $7 million pad for his family. The star also snapped up Paul Hogan’s old Malibu mansion this year for the princely sum of $5.45 million.
Not bad for a boy from Phillip Island who, not so long ago, was working as a bartender at a Melbourne nightclub to make ends meet.
It’s fair to say Hemsworth’s ascendance to theA-list has been nothing short of meteoric. In a few years he’s gone from just another Home and Away hunk to a bona fide Hollywood star, sharing the screen with Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron and Anthony Hopkins.
Yet, Hemsworth refreshingly hasn’t fallen victim to believing in his own hype.
While other stars on the rise traditionally hit the party circuit and hook up with a series of hot, young actresses, Hemsworth is happily married to Spanish actor Elsa Pataky with three young children — daughter India and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, born in March. And you’re more likely to find him surfing at Byron Bay than posing on red carpets.
“Matt Damon once said to me, ‘Just stay boring. Don’t go spilling out of a club at four in the morning and you’ll be fine’,” he says. The paparazzi got bored with us. Because we are pretty boring.”
But Hemsworth hasn’t always been the poster boy for clean living and has admitted to having briefly explored his wild side after joining the Home and Away cast in 2004.
“I had a taste of that kind of world, the drinking and everything,” he said. “No one was really watching too closely. I was able to experience all that before I got to Hollywood. After that I kept to myself a bit more.”
Down-to-earth Hemsworth — who remarks that he’s built “for comfort not for style” — also says if he didn’t remain the man he was before he hit the big time he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in the mirror.
“That type of attitude is so common,” he says of those who let fame go to their heads. “And so unnecessary. It takes effort to be that offensive a person and it takes none at all to just be yourself and get on with folks. I know which I would always choose.”
While it can take years of waiting tables and auditions for some actors to get their big break, Hemsworth scored his within six weeks of arriving in LA, thanks largely to the Aussie’s all-American good looks.
“I was lucky and got work straight away and then I had a year where I didn’t really work at all,” he says. “It’s all about timing, having the right attitude and a good work ethic. There’s no secret formula to it, if there was I would bottle it.”
The director of Hemsworth’s first film Ca$h, Stephen Milburn Anderson, recalls being wowed by the actor’s audition.
“Here’s a guy who is young, has the right look, is a very good actor and, let’s face it, he’s beautiful.So I say, ‘We need to get this guy in’. I was very impressed,” Anderson says.
Good looks and chiselled jaw aside, behind the scenes, the actor is also a passionate political activist for the protection of children and a hands-on father of three.
The son of English teacher Leonie and social-services counsellor Craig, Hemsworth was born in Melbourne and raised in the outback in a small Aboriginal community called Bulman.
“It was four and a half hours from the nearest town,” he says. “My parents ran the community centre, which doubled as a post office and grocery store. It was in the middle of nowhere. There were crocodiles and buffalo. I went to a school that was made up of 60 (Aboriginal) kids between the ages of five and 17, all mashed into two classrooms.”
Blond-haired and blue-eyed Hemsworth says he was never made to feel like an outsider.
“That’s the beautiful thing about kids, they don’t have the stupid set of prejudices and opinions that we are warped by as we get older,” he says.
“It gave me a great empathy for other people’s situations and Aboriginal culture because no one gets exposed to that. You’re not even allowed out on to certain parts of that land without permits.”
His upbringing has, no doubt, instilled in him a strong sense of social justice.
In September, Hemsworth visited Federal Parliament to meet Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop to discuss the Australian Childhood Foundation’s Not Another Child program. Hemsworth and his actor brother Liam are ambassadors for the foundation.
“Having kids makes it all the more poignant and important for me,” Hemsworth told the Daily Mail of his charity work at the time.
“It’s the right of every child to have a safe and nurturing environment to grow up in and unfortunately that’s not always the case. It’s up to all of us as a community, as human beings, to take care of each other, but especially kids.”
Though he is not a father, Liam 24, has been inspired by his parents to help kids in trouble.
“I have the best parents you can have,” he has said. “They have worked in child protection for 20 years and have only ever given me encouragement and support. The world is a scary enough place as it is for children. It is important that home should always be a safe place for them.”
Despite being in the same field, their charity work is, so far, the only time the two actors have worked together. Interestingly, Liam — who filmed a guest role in Home and Away before landing a regular gig on Neighbours — also auditioned to be Thor but lost out to his big brother.
The pair — along with elder brother Luke, 32, who is also an actor but with less success so far than his younger siblings — say they are competitive in life but supportive of each other’s careers.
“We’re competitive, as siblings are, at everything from sport, backyard cricket, football, surfing, to who’s controlling the remote control,” Hemsworth told the Yorkshire Post last year. “In this industry, not so much. All three of us understand the frailty and the inconsistencies of the work. We help each other with auditions — always have — and whatever scripts we’re working on. We’re not in direct competition, anyway. It’s more of a team effort with this than anything else.”
Ironically it was Luke, who has until recently preferred to forge a career at home, who set the family on the path to becoming Australia’s answer to the Baldwin brothers.
When Luke got his big break, on Neighbours in 2002, he inspired the younger Hemsworths to follow him into acting.
“Until then I’d had a different idea every week (about my career),” Hemsworth says. “My mates from school still joke about it. One week I was going to be a professional boxer, the next a football player or surfer or lawyer or doctor … Then Luke was doing Neighbours and I thought, ‘Yeah, that would be cool, I want to be an actor’.”
His good looks and confidence won him a role, first an episode of Neighbours, and then the role of Kim Hyde on Home and Away.
“That was my biggest learning curve,” he says of the Summer Bay soap. “I spent three and a half years on the show. You shoot 20 scenes a day, five episodes a week, so you sink or swim. If you can make it in that kind of environment, a movie set, where you have two or three days to do a scene and months to prepare, feels like a luxury.”
Liam has also made an impact in Hollywood as an action hero. However his success in the Hunger Games trilogy has been overshadowed by his personal life, thanks to his ill-fated engagement to pop star Miley Cyrus. The pair met on the set of teen movie The Last Song and their tumultuous relationship ensured they became regular fixtures in the gossip columns.
After three years of rocky romance, Twitter declarations and getting matching ink, Liam and Cyrus officially called time on their union earlier this year. Since their breakup, Liam has kept a pretty low profile while Cyrus has continued to make headlines for her twerking, tongue flicking and general bad-girl behaviour.
Liam’s on-again-off-again relationship with Cyrus stands in stark contrast to Hemsworth’s rock-steady union with Pataky, who is seven years older than him.
The couple met in 2010 through their representatives and after a whirlwind romance married that Christmas.
Before meeting Hemsworth, Pataky was involved with Kylie Minogue’s ex-boyfriend Oliver Martinez and Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody.
Hemsworth jokes that despite starring as a Formula One driver in the movie Rush and the growing list of action-man roles on his CV, Pataky is actually the more adventurous of the two in real life, admitting he’s a nervous passenger in the family car.
“It has a babyseat and surfboard in the back, it’s a pretty mellow thing,” he says. “I go, ‘Slow down, what’s the rush? There’s a red light’. She says, ‘Shut up, when did you become a driving instructor?’ ”
Despite his multimillion-dollar homes, big-budget movies and A-list pals, one thing’s for certain, Hemsworth is a man with his feet planted firmly on the ground.
“There’s still the fear; the anxiety that it could all end tomorrow,” he admits.
“That’s always in the back of my mind. It keeps me motivated. The fear keeps me hungry.”
Source: heraldsun.com
