Thor has faced the baddest villains in the universe – the Frost Giants, Malekith, Ultron. When you think of opponents for Thor, Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett might not be your first thought.
Yet Blanchett plays the toughest villain of any Thor or Avengers movie. She plays Hela, the Goddess of Death, and couldn’t wait to fight Hemsworth.
“I didn’t do enough of it,” Blanchett said. “I kept wanting to do more. But no, it was hugely enjoyable for me.”
Blanchett joins other Academy Award winning badasses like Charlize Theron and Halle Berry breaking into the superhero genre.
“Apart from working with these guys, obviously, the chance to finally, in my deep middle age, to get fit and wear that much lycra was really exciting for me,” Blanchett said.
She even had a Thor workout like Hemsworth.
“I worked with Chris’s trainer, Luke Zocchi, for 20 minutes a day which doesn’t sound like much but my god, it’s intense,” Blanchett said.
Blanchett shared a stunt double with Uma Thurman too. Zoe Bell, who doubled Thurman in Kill Bill, played Hela in scenes that required a trained professional stuntwoman.
“I was blessed every day with the fact that she was my stunt double,” Blanchett said. “Zoe helped me with little things like that. She was a great action director so I moved from the humiliating to the exhilarating in a matter of five minutes.
Hela pushes Thor out of his comfort zone. She crushes his hammer and banishes him to Zakaar.
“It just helped kind of shed anything too familiar,” Hemsworth said. “I feel like holding the hammer or even the wig and the previous costume certainly did put me in a place and set me on a path of what I already knew.”
Thor: Ragnarok is different from previous Thors in many ways. It has more of an irreverent sense of humor and a cameo from Hulk for one thing.
“I Wanted it to be unfamiliar,” Hemsworth said. “So everything from the hammer to the costume, the hair, made me, allowed me to move differently and forced me to move differently.”
Thor: Ragnarok opens tonight in theaters.