Chris Hemsworth's Thor: Love And Thunder Bod Made It Harder To Film Disney+'s Limitless
As Chris Hemsworth recounted in an interview on "Jimmy Kimmel Live," "Thor: Love and Thunder" complicated his work on his new documentary series "Limitless" quite a bit. Having invested hundreds of millions in the "Thor" sequel, Marvel Studios was understandably keen to keep its star healthy, safe, and able to perform — Hemsworth, meanwhile, had other ideas in mind. Premiering Nov. 16 on Disney+, "Limitless" puts the actor's body through various physical trials in a quest for increased longevity.
"You wanna live longer? Do a bunch of death-defying things that may kill you," Hemsworth joked to Jimmy Kimmel. The pair had just finished watching the 39-year-old actor dangle from a 100-foot rope over a 1,000-foot drop, with the intent of using his impressive strength to climb the rope to safety. "The most I'd done in training was... 20 feet, or something..." Hemsworth estimated, comparing it to the 100 feet he would need to climb for this "Limitless" stunt. "They're trying to kill me!" He laughed.
Of course, that wasn't the case — Hemsworth was assisted by professionals on each stunt, including working with a trainer who advised him to get as lean as possible to limit the weight he had to pull up the rope. Because of this, the team decided to complete the stunt before he would need to bulk up for "Thor: Love and Thunder" — that is, until Hemsworth suffered an injury on set.
Marvel Studios shut down Limitless
"The first [stunt idea for] that episode was, I was gonna pull a car across a flat track of land..." he said to Kimmel, "I hurt my back during that. So then [the creative team] said, 'lets do a rope climb.'" As they began prepping for the stunt, however, things quickly stalled. "I started training; I blow my ankle out... then Marvel stepped in and said, 'No, no. The show that might kill him? You can do that after our film."
Hemsworth's physical transformations for his "Thor" and "Avengers" outings are usually quite drastic, but his training for "Thor: Love and Thunder" was apparently on an entirely different level. "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..." (via Insider). Hemsworth has kept surprisingly busy with non-Marvel Cinematic Universe projects throughout his tenure as Thor, playing a number of characters that would be ill-served by a massive Asgardian frame.
"['Thor: 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," Hemsworth said of his training in the behind-the-scenes documentary series "Marvel Studios: Assembled." When Hemsworth finally reunited with his "Limitless" trainer for the rope stunt, they told him, "you're screwed." Chuckling on Kimmel's couch, Hemsworth continued, "'this is gonna be the hardest thing you've ever done." He described climbing the rope with his massive Thor frame as a "fistfight" — not a test of strength, but of pure will.
Fans can find out if Hemsworth succeeds in his many dangerous challenges in "Limitless," streaming on Disney+ on November 16, 2022.