By James Mottram
“This is easier to orchestrate fancy moves with,” Chris Hemsworth tells FilmInk, brandishing an axe on the London set of The Huntsman: Winter’s War. “It’s more well balanced, and better proportioned. The hammer’s pretty clumsy.” The hammer that the Australian actor mentions, of course, is Mjolnir, the big block of metal wielded by his superhero character, Thor, in the hit movies of Marvel Studios. It’s a telling reference, as the 1.9m tall actor is now shouldering his second franchise, returning to the role of the titular axe-toting hero after the success of 2012’s highly impressive fairytale update, Snow White & The Huntsman, in which he starred opposite Kristen Stewart. Directed by big screen debutante, Rupert Sanders, who had made a string of high-end commercials and music videos, the film’s dark, Lord Of The Rings-derived tone took many by surprise, as Charlize Theron’s evil and youth-obsessed Queen Ravenna traded in a brand of nastiness wholly alien to the many previous tellings of the tale. All of the essential elements of the story, however, were there – the dwarves, the magical mirror on the wall, the dashing prince, the poisoned apple – but they were refracted through a prism of striking seriousness.
Snicker if you will, but Snow White & The Huntsman was also packed with food for thought, touching intelligently on a number of fascinating issues: the world’s fixation with staying young and beautiful; the habit of rich and powerful men to throw women away when they start to age; the cruelty that unchecked power can inspire; the rarely acknowledged female victims of war; and the constant under appreciation of those worthy members of society who have been, for whatever reason, insensitively marginalised. Chris Hemsworth’s Huntsman, meanwhile, was bumped up from the original fairytale’s minor support player to co-lead, with the actor excelling as this likeable tough guy with a crate-load of emotional baggage.
Tough and handy with an axe, he’s also a grieving widower and drunkard adventurer unhappily in the employ of Queen Ravenna, and not exactly enamoured of his task of tracking down the innocent Snow White. This sequel, however, promises to be something different altogether. “My first question – as it is with anything that I’m asked to do or I’m about to do – is, ‘Is there an interest in it, and do people want to see it?’ That’s my first question. Obviously, I’m proud of the first film, but tonally, if we were coming back and having another go at it, I wanted to do something different. We all wanted it to be lighter and more fun, with more of a sense of adventure. The first one was heavy and serious and dark. I’m still proud of it, but we’re getting away from that. This script is funnier and lighter. The visuals, the colours, the aesthetic…it’s all brighter. It’s more fun. It reminds me of Willow, and it almost has an Indiana Jones feel to it, hopefully…”
Obviously, I’m proud of the first film, but tonally, if we were coming back and having another go at it, I wanted to do something different.
With Kristen Stewart and Rupert Sanders departing the franchise (though backing studio, Universal, denies that it has anything to do with their controversial, on-set, marriage-breaking love affair), The Huntsman: Winter’s War (which marks the directorial debut of the first film’s visual effects supervisor, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan) strikingly shifts gears, taking the story backwards and then forwards, unveiling both the chain of events leading up to Snow White & The Huntsman, and then revealing what takes place in the aftermath of the final battle of that film. Vitally, it also expands to reveal how the characters of Hemsworth’s Huntsman, Eric, and Charlize Theron’s Queen Ravenna, are so deeply and dangerously intertwined. Long before the evil Queen Ravenna was defeated by Snow White, she watched silently as her sister, Freya (Emily Blunt), suffered a heartbreaking betrayal and fled their kingdom. With Freya’s ability to freeze any enemy, the young ice queen has spent decades in a remote wintry palace raising a legion of deadly, emotionally isolated huntsmen – including prize recruits, Eric and Sara (Jessica Chastain) – only to find that they have defied her one demand by falling in love, and putting their relationship above the huntsman’s cause. Years later, when Freya learns of her sister’s demise, she summons her remaining soldiers to bring The Magic Mirror to her so she can harness its power. But once she discovers that Ravenna can be resurrected from its golden depths, the wicked sisters unite in a new, doubly horrific campaign to rule the land. Now all that stands in their way are Eric and Sara. “They’re coming back to haunt him,” Hemsworth offers of Freya and Ravenna. “There are all sorts of things that happened early in his life which are now boiling to the surface, and it’s him reuniting with his wife, who he had assumed was dead, in an interesting, complex way.”
It’s a far richer and more grounded concept than the one originally casually tossed about for a proposed sequel. “We were standing on set one day with the producer, Joe Roth, who is known for bringing to life a lot of fairytales and classic stories,” Hemsworth says of the man behind Alice In Wonderland, Oz The Great And Powerful, and Maleficent. “So jokingly, we were like, ‘Maybe The Huntsman can go rescue Cinderella or Rapunzel and so on.’ We were humouring each other to begin with, but then we started thinking about it more seriously. What would that story be? It got talked about, but a lot of the feedback that I got about the first film as far as my character goes was about the scene in the church where he’s talking about his past and about his wife. People said, ‘I wish that we understood more about that, or that we had more time to visit that story.’ They seemed to be points of interest, so that’s where this idea for the sequel first came from.”
Thanks to the audience interest in The Huntsman, Hemsworth has been afforded the rare chance to revisit a character on screen, and fill in a few of the gaps that yawned open for him from the first film. No stranger to sequels due to his continuing tenure as Marvel’s Thor, Hemsworth is shooting to give The Huntsman a similar kind of expansiveness. “When you shoot a movie, a lot has to get cut out, or else you end up with a four-hour movie,” the actor says. “So a lot of The Huntsman’s stuff in the first movie was pulled out in order to make the film work. I remember feeling like that was not how I thought that he was going to come across…I thought that there was going to be more fun to him, but there just wasn’t time for it in the final edit. So coming back to it was exciting. I thought, ‘Cool, if we do it again, I want to make sure this is how it comes across.’ You don’t often get that opportunity unless you’re part of a franchise-type thing. It’s nice to come back and have another go at it, and to have a fresh take on it. That’s the challenge: to make sure that it is fresh and new. I want to do something fresh every time, and so far the feedback has been really positive. I think that we’re hitting that mark, which is exciting.”
For some detractors, there hasn’t been quite enough freshness, with The Huntsman – a big, bruising, weapon-wielding good guy – deemed decidedly similar to Thor. Scratch away the surface similarities, however, and the characters share an obvious physicality, and not much more. At the beginning of Snow White & The Huntsman, Hemsworth’s axe-wielder is a drunken mess drowning in grief and struggling to keep himself emotionally stitched together. In The Huntsman: Winter’s War, he’ll feel even less like The God Of Thunder. “I’ve tried to distance it even more,” Hemsworth says. “With the first one, as I said, a lot of the humour got pulled out in the edit, and it became a little straighter, kind of like Thor. I didn’t want to do that again, and that’s the way it’s turned out. This time, it’s far less slick too. It’s something that Cedric and I talked about…we wanted to create something of a throwback to those western saloon brawls, where somehow he wins the fight and he shouldn’t have, and it’s clumsy and messy. It’s very different to watching someone like Thor, where everything is polished and heroic and big. He might be fighting a big villain, but you know that he’s probably going to win. With this, we’re trying to do the opposite type of thing: we want him to be a lot more vulnerable and a lot more susceptible to losing. Eric is not a god, and we don’t need that layered through everything that he says. He’s much more grounded and human, which is a nice change.”
The Huntsman: Winter’s War also sees Hemsworth surrounded by a cadre of highly impressive actresses. Does he consider himself a feminist? “Oh yeah, for sure,” Hemsworth replies. “My mum’s a big feminist. Both my mum and dad have been hugely positive influences on my life. As far as my respect for women, that certainly comes from both my mum and dad. My dad has a very balanced and respectful view on a lot of things. That’s another thing that I thought was great tonally about this film: the strength of it was in these three women and their performances, and in the heart and soul that they’ve blended through these characters. In The Avengers, the balance has been tipped heavily in the men’s direction, with seven or eight male superheroes and one female in there. This is the opposite. It’s exciting to be a part of something like that. We haven’t quite seen it to this level before. But also: why the hell not?! It’s such a funny conversation to have. Of course it should be that way, and of course it should be equal, and there should be the same opportunities.”
With The Huntsman: Winter’s War in cinemas, Chris Hemsworth is now ready to wield mighty Mjolnir once again, with Thor: Ragnarok just about to begin production in Queensland (not too far away from Byron Bay on NSW’s far north coast, where the actor now makes his home with his wife, Elsa Pataky, and three young children) under the direction of New Zealander, Taika Waititi (What We Do In The Shadows). “I’ve been lucky to do other things, like The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” Hemsworth says of the huge time demands of working in The Marvel Cinematic Universe. “But I’ve got to make a conscious effort to do it, because Thor is sort of my default position. I’ve done it so much, and it’s easy to go, ‘Oh yeah, click, oops, I’m doing that again.’ I remember when I first signed up, they were like, ‘It’s a six picture deal,’ and I was like, ‘Come on, we’re not going to make six! That’s wishful thinking, isn’t it?’ And then the first one worked. And we thought, ‘Oh, wow.’ And then it was the Avengers discussion, and then it was Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and then The Avengers 3, and then possibly The Avengers 4. And it was like, ‘Whoa! I love it.’ I love being a part of it. I love being a part of something that has that much of a following and an appreciation. I can take risks and duck out and do other things, and if they don’t work, I can quickly jump back on this train. And as of next year, the Marvel train is,” Hemsworth pauses without finishing, hammering home the enormity of what is to come. “We do Thor: Ragnarok, and then Avengers: Infinity War Parts 1 & 2 in a row, so it’s going to be difficult to sustain that sort of energy. By the end of four months on any of those films, I’m done with working out, and I’m done with that character, you know? I need to refresh…so it’s going to be interesting.” The journey stars now…
The Huntsman: Winter’s War is released in cinemas on April 7.
