Courtesy of a Nikki Finke exclusive, it seems Marvel has its Thor. Just days after Kenneth Branagh talked about Thor casting delays, the word is Chris Hemsworth will wield the mighty Mjolnir. That’s right, Captain Kirk’s dad in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot is now Marvel’s God of Thunder.
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Hemsworth has had a whirlwind of a month: he was captain of a starship for 12 minutes just last week, cast as the lead in Red Dawn on Thursday, and the 25-year-old Aussie was doing an Australian TV series just last November. After 171 episodes of being “Kim Hyde” on Home and Away, he’s getting his big break with Thor - but it took two reads for him to be chosen as Odin’s son.
Finke reports Hemsworth had read for the part before but “wasn’t given a test because a casting director had nixed him early on.” Apparently his younger brother tested for the role too, but Marvel passed. William Ward, Hemsworth’s rep and partner/founder at ROAR Management, then convinced Marvel’s executive Kevin Feige to reconsider. They let Hemsworth read again and it sure sounded like director Kenneth Branagh had a choice in mind 3 days ago, but the final decision was made today.
With Asgard as the stage, Hemsworth better brush up on his Olde English and bulk-up his body, because Thor’s winged helmet isn’t anything like that feather-weight uniform handed out by the United Federation. Marvel bringing Branagh on to helm Thor was pretty ballsy, but casting a relative-unknown to be the Norse God? Marvel might have hit it’s 2011 blockbuster hat trick.
Thor is scheduled to begin production next January with a May 20, 2011 release.
The announcement of Chris Hemsworth puts to rest months and months of speculation about who would play Thor. Do you think Hemsworth can handle the magic hammer?
Source: Nikki Finke
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100 Comments
@David
Keep in mind that they actually want to move away from all of the more supernatural stuff like “gods” and they super powers you see in comic books. They want to keep it somewhat believable. The way they explained Thor is that his powers are actually not supernatural, they actually will be based on science, just science more advanced than we can understand.
So a true to the comic book Thor as a god thing will not really happen on the big screen according to the current marvel movie universe they’ve been building with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk… He’ll simply have god-LIKE powers but they’ll actually have a [fake] scientific explanations behind them…
So the character can’t be all unbelievable, tall and ripped, yes, but comic book character level unbelievably huge, no. Hemsworth has the height and the voice down, he just needs to be a little more ripped and he will do the part justice in my opinion.
And now with Ray Stevenson on the ticket, he’ll actually have some competition in terms of who’s the “big guy” on the set, lol.
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