Chris Hemsworth has said he was able to throw the superhero rulebook “out the window” for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, even though his character still wears a cape and he finds them “so impractical.”
Hemsworth, who usually plays the charming hero-type, having portrayed Thor in the MCU, stepped into the role of wicked warlord Dementus for the Fury Road prequel — but he didn’t ditch the cape. The actor told Entertainment Weekly it was fun to take on a different type of role, but the cape was nothing more than a coincidence.
“It was a real departure, and it was nice… I was about to say it was nice not to wear a cape, but… I did have a cape in this film,” Hemsworth pointed out. “And it’s red — or it becomes red eventually, as well. The absurdity of that.
“It’s not intentional to be a comparison of Thor,” the actor continued, “but I found a wonderful departure to it. To play the villain, transform, and inhabit a completely different physicality was a lot of fun. I loved it. And it was the real attraction.”
Despite them being a staple in his wardrobe as an actor, Hemsworth isn’t a fan of wearing capes. He said that he hates them because they’re “so impractical,” as he recalled one of Thor’s sleeveless cloaks was “a foot or so shorter than the normal cape,” but it was not sensible because he was “tripping over it all the time.”
For Furiosa, Hemsworth was able “to dirty it up and to be messy and ugly and violent and chaotic, rather than being in the somewhat predictable box of the hero in a superhero space.” He noted: “There’s a whole lot of rules that you have to stick to [with superhero films]. With this, I could throw that out the window, which was nice.”
Will Hemsworth wear the superhero cape once again in a new Thor movie? In a recent interview, he said he feels he owes fans another Thor movie after admitting “I didn’t stick the landing’ with Thor: Love and Thunder.
We first learned of Hemsworth’s casting in 2020 when reports revealed he was joining the George Miller-helmed movie alongside Anya Taylor-Joy and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Abdul-Mateen later departed the project due to a scheduling conflict, with Tom Burke replacing him as Praetorian Jack.
Trailers for Furiosa have already given Mad Max fans a glimpse of Taylor-Joy’s renegade warrior and Hemsworth’s “totally against type” lead villain, who is revving up to ride onto the big screen when Furiosa opens in theaters on May 24 — the same month as The Fall Guy, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and IF.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter @AdeleAnkers.
