In ‘Furiosa,’ Chris Hemsworth steals the spotlight
In ‘Furiosa,’ Chris Hemsworth steals the spotlight
Warning: Some “Furiosa” spoilers ahead.
CANNES, France — Chris Hemsworth has so many scene-chewing moments as an absolute psychopath in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” they could fill the tank of a massive war rig screaming across the desert. He has perhaps created one of the all-time-great screen villains in his bike-gang leader Warlord Dementus, who has kidnapped a young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) and claimed her as his daughter. It’s also a problem of perhaps too much of a good thing. Like Ryan Gosling’s Ken in “Barbie,” Hemsworth’s Dementus may have the best part — and by far the most dialogue and funniest lines — in a movie named after its main female character.
The film’s trailer highlights Anya Taylor-Joy taking over the role of the Wasteland’s toughest woman, which Charlize Theron played so fiercely in “Fury Road.” Taylor-Joy’s young adult Furiosa is a determined survivor, with a balletic physicality that allows her to escape many scrapes with death, including an incredible extended sequence fighting off attackers while hanging from the undercarriage of a moving war rig. But because Browne plays Furiosa as a child, Taylor-Joy doesn’t show up until halfway through the movie, as someone who has gone mute and is pretending to be a boy as a survival mechanism. Most of her screen time, including a possible love connection with war-rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, the smoldering, louche lead of “The Souvenir”), is spent in silence while delivering piercing stares.
“I mean, you could count how many lines she has in the whole movie. She probably has 25 lines, through no fault of Chris Hemsworth’s,” said Sean Glass, an executive producer of the American film “Gazer” that is playing in the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section. “He was great, and he has significantly more dialogue, and it’s just about the [way] the movie is set up. It’s her story, it’s her arc, but yet he gets the performance.”
"Furiosa" star Anya Taylor-Joy at the film's premiere at Cannes on Wednesday.
Hemsworth, meanwhile, appears born to play this role — and knows it. “The ‘Mad Max’ franchise has a very special place in my heart, being Australian,” he said at a news conference on Thursday. “So [shooting the film] was vivid and had a wonderful sort of nostalgia about my childhood.”
The character has also allowed him to finally lean into his real accent. “It’s the first time he’s gotten to go full bloke,” actor Billy Zane told The Washington Post after seeing the film.
Zane, who has played his fair share of villains and doesn’t know Hemsworth, felt compelled to congratulate him. “He did such a wonderful job allowing us to access the cycle of trauma and understand that character,” Zane said. “And in the third act, as he’s starting to fray at the edges, his restraint and showmanship were in the correct balance. He found the humor and the tragedy and the danger. I think it was some of his best work.”
He added, “I’ve always been a fan, but it was great to see him wear a little bit of age in the character, as well. I was laughing my a-- off, relishing his relish.”
One can envision Hemsworth dominating a new lane in his 40s, as a gritty villain after a career of largely playing heroes.
In a scene from "Furiosa," Hemsworth's Warlord Dementus roams the desert with his menacing bike gang.
“Chris is my neighbor who lives near me in Australia,” Baz Luhrmann, who was at the premiere, told The Post. “There’s nothing more exciting than seeing an actor throw themselves at roles that you don’t know they can do. And I’m there to support any actor that’s going to play a different note on their instrument.”
Sitting in the audience, Luhrmann said, “I wasn’t seeing Chris. He’s a combination of Falstaff and Chopper [a ruthless prisoner Eric Bana plays in a cult 2000 Australian crime drama of the same name]. I was seeing Mussolini. Just so many sociopaths, who are incredibly funny on one hand and terrifying at the same time.”
His iconically ridiculous baddie — perhaps the most loquacious character in any “Mad Max” film — is a perpetual man-child with a dodgy prosthetic hook nose who drives a Roman gladiator’s chariot powered by two choppers. Dementus’s entire family was slaughtered, we later find out, and that teddy bear he wears attached to his belt belongs to the daughter he lost, which is why he tries to protect Furiosa, while doing any number of things to deeply psychologically scar her and endanger her life. The violence he turns to so easily is his own survival mechanism, a way to feel anything in the face of numbness or crushing despair.
Indeed, one of the first questions at the movie’s post-premiere news conference was for Hemsworth, rather than Taylor-Joy.
“Mr. Hemsworth, amazing character who seems to have the cruelty of Darth Vader with a touch of the Looney Tunes,” said a Brazilian journalist, as the press room burst into laughter. “How do you define his sense of humanity and mercy?”
Hemsworth, who grew up on “Mad Max” films, said that he and director George Miller worked hard to try to give Dementus an emotional context. They wanted audiences to understand that “he was a product of the Wasteland and that he, too, had suffered tremendously and had a traumatic past — not to excuse his horrific actions, but you know, to understand that he was responding and tried to survive in a very brutal space.”
Chris Hemsworth with fans at the U.K. premiere of "Furiosa" in London.
He also wanted to give the character a “bombastic nature” and make him absurd and contradictory and, hopefully, surprising. “I like the way that humor can lull you into a false sense of comfort,” he said. “So then when you do something that is violent, or near violence, it’s unexpected. As opposed to hinting at it or setting it up in an obvious way, you have the freedom to be sort of inconsistent, as we humans are… and I loved every second of the experience.”
Every time Hemsworth’s name has come up at Cannes, the response has been in the vein of, “I know! So good!” Or “It’s the best thing he’s ever done.”
Another actor might have made the character a dumb-dumb, but in Hemsworth’s hands, he’s a wounded nihilist who gets petulant and says lines like, “You make me the Dark Dementus, and the Dark Dementus cannot be soft!” And when he gets hit by a cloud of red smoke from a flare gun — turning his beard and white cape flaming red — he stretches his arms out wide and breathes it in, like his satanic dial just got turned up to 11.
Sure, Hemsworth isn’t hurting for work. There will always be a place for a funny, handsome 6-foot-3 Australian global superstar in an industry full of guys who wear lifts in their shoes.
But even Marvel-heads would agree that his oeuvre outside of “Thor” has been thin. Yes, there are his Netflix “Extraction” movies — not to mention “Ghostbusters” and “Rush” — and yet so far, he has occupied a space in the pop-cultural consciousness as the most muscle-y Chris. He’s the one with the accent and the other muscle-y brothers who didn’t destroy an architectural masterpiece, like Chris Pratt; or become immeasurably cooler by dating Jenny Slate, like Chris Evans; and who doesn’t dress like a blind eccentric billionaire, like Chris Pine.
Director George Miller (center left, standing on ground) on the set of "Furiosa" with Hemsworth, who wears a prosthetic nose.
He has been able to show range. He was funny in “Ghostbusters,” almost unrecognizable in “Rush,” and a good “Saturday Night Live” host. He’s also, apparently, very skilled at making a fitness app (according to a friend who uses it) and charming enough to be a co-host of the Met Gala while doing the absolute least in fashion. “Tom Ford sweatpants,” he called his loose, cream-colored suit, on the red carpet in early May, and it wasn’t far off. (His ensemble at the Cannes premiere of “Furiosa” on Wednesday was a black version of the same.)
For some who have followed his career, Hemsworth isn’t really operating out of a different toolbox. “He’s playing the same thing [as Thor]; it’s just a cool, self-justified bad guy instead of a good guy,” Glass said.
The audience knows he’ll be punished in the end, but by giving him that tragic backstory, “we’re allowed to be taken in by his charisma, because his charisma is built of great relatable pain,” said Glass. Like Thor, Dementus is at war with the world because his world was taken away from him, and he’s left to wander the Wasteland in search of a home and a sense of belonging. “[Hemsworth] is so charismatic; he’s great, but he’s not doing something new. I think he’s just in a better movie doing what he’s already done.”
Now that he’s free of a restrictive Marvel contract, Hemsworth finally has enough room in his schedule to dig into roles he might have otherwise gravitated toward but his agents might not have let him do.
It looks like it’s going to be a glorious ride.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” opens in theaters on Friday.