The new and awesomely explosive Thor trailer premiered last week (which you can check out below), around the same time as our New York City photo shoot for this year’s summer movie preview in April. On the cover will be none other than the two biggest superheroes of the summer, Thor star Chris Hemsworth and Captain America himself, Chris Evans. We’ll have more about the shoot and my interviews with the two, but I asked Hemsworth (at right, with the toy version of his god of thunder) if he had to alter his own Australian accent to perfect the Asgardian dialect of Thor. “We tried to head toward a more British sort of feel to it. But also, the general feel and the resonance of the voice was more important,” Hemsworth says. “And the dialogue was such that it had an old English feel. All those elements contribute to it. But it wasn’t like we were regionally going, ‘OK, he’s from the south of London.’ ” The real secret: “Hitting the consonants and getting rid of the heavy vowel sounds,” Hemsworth says before quipping, “You don’t say, ‘G’day, mate.’ That’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it?” Thor is released in theaters May 6 and co-stars Natalie Portman, and Hemsworth definitely connected with the Oscar-nominated Black Swan actress on a certain level when it came to physical preparation. Read below for Hemsworth’s take on working with the odds-on favorite to take home the Best Actress Academy Award come Sunday.
Photos courtesy of Hasbro, Paramount Pictures
A natural athlete, Hemsworth pumped some serious iron to get Thor’s buff physique for the movie, and he was able to commiserate with Portman, who was coming out of her arduous dance training for Black Swan. “Yeah, we merged our training styles — a weightlifting ballet routine we invented together, which didn’t work,” Hemsworth says, laughing. “She empathized with me and I empathized with her of what she’d just been through. She had months and months of grueling training. We certainly understood where each other had come from and where we were going.”
