Chris Hemsworth is inching towards a significant milestone soon, and it’s the realization that he isn’t going to be here forever that haunts his thoughts more than anything.
Frankly, the possibility of losing the talented Aussie actor is a difficult thing to contemplate — even for us. Most folks know Hemsworth from the MCU, where he’s played the mythological God of Thunder for over a decade, but his acting career actually encompasses a wide spectrum of roles across numerous genres. He will no doubt continue to appear in a lot of movies over the next couple of decades, but Hemsworth himself isn’t looking particularly forward to turning 40 in a few months.
“I don’t think I wanna turn 40,” he tells GQ magazine. “I still feel like I’m 25 and I’ve got heaps of time. Now I’m like, ‘Oh, I could be halfway. More than halfway.'”
Hemsworth’s grandpa passing away recently at the age of 93 with Alzheimer’s has given him a new perspective in life, especially since he also has the genome that puts him at a much higher risk for it.
“My uncle specifically said, ‘He’s remembered as a good bloke.’ And if he knew, or if someone told him that’s how he would be remembered, how incredibly proud he would feel. It made me think about my own life. And it wasn’t about career or anything. It was about being remembered as someone who was good and kind and contributed something of value… I certainly don’t think about the films I’m going to leave behind and how people are going to remember me in that sense. I hope that people think of me fondly and that I was a good person. That I was a good bloke. Like my grandpa.”
Of course, there was also that anxious period when Hemsworth’s Avengers co-star, Jeremy Renner, suffered a terrible incident and sustained life-threatening injuries. Being the God of Thunder on the big screens doesn’t make one feel invincible, and it certainly shatters life’s natural illusions of safety when someone close to you gets in a situation where they’re fighting for their lives. As Hemsworth explains it:
“We were all on our Avengers text chain, we were all chatting. And it was wild. None of us really knew how serious it was. I think anything like that, it’s an immediate realization of ‘Wow, any of us can go at any minute.'”
I guess we all have an inevitable appointment with Mistress Death at some point, but for now, let’s assume that our favorite onscreen deity will continue to swing that mythical hammer for many years.