By Gina McIntyre


A bone-chilling wind and a fine sheet of mist cascaded off the River Thames, but it wasn’t the bitter blasts of air that sent Chris Hemsworth tumbling to the ground.
Late on a November afternoon, the brawny Australian actor threw himself down onto the courtyard of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich over and over, filming scenes for what would eventually become the epic final battle in Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World.
The film, due out Friday, sees the god of Thunder facing off against a nemesis called Malekith, part of a race known as the Dark Elves, but actor Christopher Eccleston already had called it quits for the day.
That left Thor, dressed in full armour, long red cape billowing out majestically behind him, to press on alone, with Hemsworth gamely absorbing imaginary blows for the cameras, again and again.
“I’ve been doing that for the last four, five, six weeks,” Hemsworth said between takes. “Just rolling on the ground, on the rocks in Iceland, various locations around London. I’m like, ‘When am I going to win one of these fights?’ I’m on the receiving end of it all, and it ain’t fun.”
Bad weather and bruises are the least of Thor’s worries in his second solo big-screen outing. Directed by Alan Taylor (Game of Thrones), Thor: The Dark World begins with the story of Malekith, who was ostensibly vanquished by Thor’s grandfather but finds his way back from beyond with a plan to use a weapon called the Aether to plunge the Nine Realms of the universe into darkness.
Only by uniting with his devious brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) can Thor hope to stop Malekith and rescue his lady love Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who stumbles onto the Aether and is inadvertently drawn into the Dark Elf’s schemes.
Since releasing Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Studios has evolved into a can’t-miss blockbuster movie machine, transforming characters that had long taken a back seat to the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men into marquee attractions and launching or re-launching the big-screen careers of actors such as Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr and directors including Kenneth Branagh, who took the reins on 2011’s Thor. (The summer 2012 hit The Avengers, which brought together all of the company’s A-list heroes, is the third-highest-grossing film of all time, without adjusting for inflation; this past summer’s Iron Man 3 ranks 13th on that same list.)
Still, Thor: The Dark World might be Marvel’s most quintessentially comic book movie yet. Granted, extraterrestrial warriors called Chitauri invaded New York in Avengers and Hugo Weaving had a red skull for a face in Captain America. But the CG-laden Thor sequel sees its heroes jumping between worlds, its villain speaking an invented Elvish language that’s translated with subtitles, and the movie features one or two creatures that easily could have dropped in from a galaxy far, far away.
“It’s only fun to make a movie that’s risky; otherwise, they become very cookie-cutter, colour-by-numbers things we don’t want to do,” said Marvel movie chief Kevin Feige.
In Taylor, though, Feige recruited a television veteran with a track record of rooting elaborate fantasy in the real world. Although he’s directed episodes of such critically acclaimed series as The Sopranos, Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire, it was his work on HBO’s Game of Thrones that suggested his sensibility might be a solid match for Thor.
“The Thor movies, they’re superhero movies, but they’re grounded in mythology, not just the mythology of the comics but Norse mythology,” Taylor said.
“I was a history major and wanted to be a history professor and have always been drawn to things that allow me to use the mystique of history. That’s why I was drawn to Game of Thrones, and that’s why I loved doing Rome and Deadwood. You get to use history to represent a world that’s alien but also familiar.”
Taylor relocated from Brooklyn to London in June last year to begin pre-production on the $170-mn movie, which shot on location for about four months, travelling to Iceland for one week to capture the bleak vistas of Svartalfheim, the planet of the Dark Elves.
Eccleston, the accomplished British thespian known to many genre aficionados for his one-season run on the beloved cult series Doctor Who, said he relied on Taylor a great deal when it came to fine-tuning his performance. He said he struggled to bring a level of pathos to Malekith even while buried in extensive prosthetic makeup, icy blue contact lenses and an elaborate white wig, all of which took four hours to apply.
“You can feel vulnerable in a film like this,” Eccleston said. “No matter how experienced you are, you can feel silly. A director can help you through that with humour and with intelligence.”
Although it’s been only two years since he first picked up Thor’s hammer, Hemsworth, 30, has become a sought-after leading man working with directors including Michael Mann (next year’s Cyber) and Ron Howard (September’s racing biopic Rush and next year’s drama Heart of the Sea).
The actor said that pursuing dramatic roles in other projects has helped him find renewed energy to bring to his Marvel alter ego, a character he could potentially reprise in a third Thor movie and two Avengers sequels.
That energy and renewed commitment certainly appeared to be useful as Hemsworth, sporting a faux wound on his temple, picked up his hammer and prepared to head back to set.
“I started my career on TV — I was on one show in particular for three years — so I know what it’s like to just exhaust a story or a character,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that to happen with this. So far, so good.”  — Los Angeles Times/MCT


The cast


Chris Hemsworth as Thor
The crown prince of Asgard, based on the Norse mythological deity of the same name. Hemsworth stated that the film addresses unresolved issues regarding Thor’s relationships from previous films, “For Thor and Jane, there are some unanswered questions now, since obviously he didn’t stop in and catch up with her in The Avengers. Thor might have some explaining to do in this one. And with Loki, we get down to the major bones of our conflict with everything that’s come from Thor to Avengers to now.”
Hemsworth added: “Thor’s journey I think picks more so up from where we left the first one — About to take on the throne... and now coming to the realisation of what responsibility comes with that. Also, Alan (Taylor) keeps talking about the dark side of that responsibility, and the secrets of being king or becoming sort of very political about what people need to know and what they want to know.”

Natalie Portman as Jane Foster
An astrophysicist and Thor’s love interest, who is brought from Earth to Asgard by Thor after she is infected with a mysterious energy. Producer Kevin Feige said: “While Thor was a fish out of water on Earth in the first two films (Thor and The Avengers), this time Jane is very much a fish out of water in Asgard.” Portman reiterated: “It was a whole different adventure this time. Because Jane is the fish out of water. I didn’t want to make it like Bill & Ted, or like a valley girl dumped into Shakespeareland.”

Tom Hiddleston as Loki
Thor’s adoptive brother and nemesis, based on the deity of the same name, who forms an uneasy alliance with Thor against the Dark Elves. On where he wished to take the character in the film, Hiddleston said, “I’d like to take (Loki) to his absolute rock bottom. I’d like to see him yield, essentially, to his darkest instincts. Then, having hit rock bottom, maybe come back up. I think the fascination for me about playing Loki is that, in the history of the mythology and the comic books and the Scandinavian myths, is he’s constantly dancing on this fault line of the dark side and redemption.” Hiddleston recalled, “When I met Alan (Taylor), he asked me how I thought I could do Loki again without repeating myself and I remembered talking with Kevin Feige when we were on the Avengers promotional tour. I said, ‘OK, you’ve seen Thor and Loki be antagonistic for two films now. It would be amazing to see them fight side by side. I’ve been the bad guy now twice, so I can’t be again, or otherwise I shouldn’t be in the film. So we have to find a new role for me to play.”

Anthony Hopkins as Odin
The king of Asgard, father of Thor, and adoptive father of Loki, based on the deity of the same name, who disapproves of Jane Foster being in Asgard. Regarding Thor’s relationship with his father, Hemsworth said, “The conflict between Thor and Odin was so great in the first one... so, certainly they disagree as I think they always will at times but there’s a far greater respect from each other. So it becomes, I guess, a more mature conversation, but there’s more at stake this time, too. It’s not sort of just their individual egos, the whole universe is at stake.”

Christopher Eccleston as Malekith
The ruler of the Dark Elves of Svartalfheim. About Malekith’s motivation, Eccleston said, “There is a kind of tragic quality to his quest. Because he’s lost his wife, he’s lost his children. He’s lost everything. And he returns for revenge. And the agent for his revenge is the Aether. If he gets hold of that, he is omnipotent.” Eccleston continued, “What I thought about a great deal was revenge — there’s huge amounts of revenge. One quote is: ‘When you seek revenge, be sure to dig two graves.’ I did a film called Revengers Tragedy where I played a guy called Vindici — from the word ‘vindictive’ — and he is the distillation of revenge. So, in a way, that was what I had to think of: how revenge can make you absolutely monomaniacal — though you’re still trying to make it recognisably motive-led. It’s just the personification of movie evil.” Eccleston said the role required six hours of make-up and 45 minutes in wardrobe.