Chris Hemsworth drops string of revelations in rare in-depth interview

Chris Hemsworth has given a rare interview about his personal life, revealing he hasn’t worked in 7 months and that he recently suffered a tragic loss.

Chris Hemsworth has given a rare interview about his personal life. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Christian Gilles

Chris Hemsworth has given a rare interview about his private life, dropping a series of personal revelations.

The charismatic Australian actor, 39, sat down for a lengthy feature with British GQ, discussing his decade-long career as one of Hollywood’s most bankable big screen stars.

In the feature, Hemsworth reveals he is currently “unemployed”, having spent the past seven months shacked up in his Byron Bay home; Surfing, dropping his three children to school, spending quality time with his wife since 2010, Elsa Pataky, and doing some intense soul-searching following recent setbacks. He also revealed he is mourning the loss of his beloved grandfather, who died recently after suffering Alzheimer’s.

While filming the Disney+ docu-series Limitless, Hemsworth learned he is 8 to 10 times more likely than the average individual to develop Alzheimer’s disease, a revelation which first made headlines late last year.

As he approaches turning 40 in August, Hemsworth conceded, “The reality of ‘I’m not going to be here forever’ is sinking in.”

Hemsworth has been savouring downtime in Byron Bay with his family since November. Picture: Chris Hemsworth/Instagram

“I’ve just been enjoying downtime,” he added, describing his current work situation as “unemployed”.

“I find most of your problems are created through boredom, when you’re sitting around and you have nothing else to think about except, ‘Oh, what can I pick apart here, what else can I assess and criticise within myself?’

“All of a sudden [now that he’s having a break], there’s a lot of questions that I probably haven’t answered … I’ve been conveniently distracted and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s look a little deeper.’

“Nothing overly dramatic … ‘Who am I? What am I doing? What’s my contribution? Is what I’m doing of value?’”

He pondered mortality even more so when his Marvel co-star, US actor Jeremy Renner, was involved in a terrible snowplow accident near his Lake Tahoe home in January.

“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,” Hemsworth said. “I think anything like that, it’s an immediate realisation of ‘Wow, any of us can go at any minute’.”

A dad first and foremost: Hemsworth has been busy on the school run with his three children, daughter India and twin boys Tristan and Sasha.

Further, Hemsworth said his beloved grandfather, Martin, recently died aged 93, having suffered from Alzheimer’s in his final years.

Hemsworth felt honoured by how deeply respected Martin was among his peers at the funeral, forcing him to think about what he wants his own legacy to be.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Hemsworth has been embarking on some soul-searching. Picture: VALERIE MACON / AFP

For his first big-budget press tour in his debut outing as Thor back in 2011, Hemsworth brought Martin along for the ride. In first class, no less.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see his face. He’s really going to appreciate this.’ And he had the same appreciative, happy look on his face that he had when he was cooking the burnt sausages in the backyard. It was all the same to him,” Hemsworth said.

“Everything has more importance now, Because of the realisation that this isn’t going to last forever.”

While he’s been savouring down time since November, Hemsworth isn’t far from appearing on again, with Netflix’s Extraction 2 coming out on June 16, while the hotly-anticipated Mad Max prequel Furiosa, which shot in Australia last year, is slated for a 2024 release.

You can read Chris Hemsworth’s full interview in GQ magazine.