(NOTE LANGUAGE) Thor: Love and Thunder had the third-biggest opening of the pandemic era, raking in $153 million Stateside and more than $302 million overseas over the weekend.
For Chris Hemsworth, who, in a Marvel, became the first hero to have four stand-alone movies — some of that success comes back to Christian Bale and his aptly named villain Gorr The God Butcher.
Gorr’s deity killing spree eventually puts him toe-to-toe with Hemsworth’s hero.
“He’s my favorite villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Hemsworth insisted at a recent press event.
“There’s this empathetic quality there…You kind of find yourself going, “Ahh…what he’s doing is wrong. But I get the sort of, the motivation behind it."”
For his part, Bale — who, of course, played Batman in Chris Nolan‘s Dark Knight trilogy — gave credit for his performance to a trio of makeup artists who had him in the chair four hours every morning.
“[Y]ou don’t really know exactly what you’re doing with a character like that until you see it completely, it’s in your imagination…This was a pious man with tattoos and he’s cut those off. And so we have all of those scars. And that’s when you really get to start playing with it and experiment…,” he said.
Bale self-deprecatingly offered a reason why he was hired, and it had to do with Hemsworth’s…assets, which are on display in the film.
“I think in Gorr, they look for an actor, polar opposites [from Hemsworth]: Someone not relatable, a bit of a loner, creepy. Someone no one wants to be around and nobody wants to see his a**,” he said. “And so I think they went, ‘Yeah, we found that in Bale."”
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