He may have recently gone from dad bod to god bod for his latest appearance in the MCU, but Chris Hemsworth really hopes he doesn’t have to be ripped for the next Thor movie. Hemsworth is more than accustomed to revealing his muscles on screen of course, after his prolific career in the superhero movie game, but maybe the abs will be absent in the future.
Hemsworth has been a part of the Thor cast since 2011, when he starred in his first solo Marvel movie. After Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans left the franchise, Hemsworth’s God of Thunder now remains as one of the longest-standing MCU characters, and he’s gone through some changes during that time. From having no eyebrows, to getting a drastic hair cut, to being overweight and depressed, Thor has had more evolutions than a Pokémon.
Now, as part of the Thor: Love and Thunder Assembled documentary on the streaming service Disney Plus, Hemsworth has spoken about his hopes for a less strenuous training regime the next time he gears up for an MCU movie.
“Each time I’ve played the character and put the muscle on and put the size on, and then lost it for something else and played another character, there’s muscle memory, and I used to say it sort of got easier each time,” Hemsworth explained. “[Love and Thunder] was particularly hard. I think because the target weight we aimed for was quite a ways above where I’d been before.”
“We had 12 months when I was at home, just training and sort of, you know, puppeteering the body and manipulating and trying to like, ‘OK, we could try more swimming now or try more martial arts.’ It was a really fun exploration, but I don’t know that I wanna get that big again,” he added. “It was just exhausting. I don’t know, maybe I’m getting old, but things just started to hurt more.”
Being an action movie star does sound pretty gruelling, so we can’t blame Hemsworth for wanting to take it down a notch next time around. It remains to be seen what the next Thor movie will entail; whether it will be more of a comedy movie again or return to more combat heavy storylines.
For more from the world of comic books, check out our guide to what Marvel’s Phase 5 will consist of. Or, take a look at our list of the best Marvel villains if you’re tired of the good guys.