Chris Hemsworth’s death-defying stunts had to wait until after filming MCU superhero movie “Thor: Love and Thunder.” Hemsworth revealed that Marvel halted production on his Disney+ reality series “Limitless” after he injured his ankle while training for one of the challenges.
“I said, ‘Great, we’ll do it before I shoot ‘Thor,’” Hemsworth said during “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “Anyway, I started training, I blow my ankle out, and Marvel stepped in and said, ‘No. The show that might kill him, you can do that after our film.’”
Hemsworth’s accident happened during a “pretty intense” stunt for “Limitless” involving climbing to the top of a cable car using only a rope suspended 100 feet below the dangling car.
“It was a combination of, like, the intensity of the height but also just trying to muscle my way up the rope,” Hemsworth said of his injury. However, after putting it on hold until completing “Thor: Love and Thunder” production, Hemsworth’s bulkiness made it even more difficult.
“It’s about time I came to actually shoot, I was at the end of ‘Thor,’ and I was Thor size, and my trainer looked at me and said, ‘You’re screwed. This is going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done,’” Hemsworth recalled. “[The challenge] would not even be about strength, it became the will to fist fight to try and get up the thing.”
Hemsworth also surfed and swam in Arctic waters for “Limitless,” requiring him to work with an exercise scientist. The six-part series, created by “The Whale” director Darren Aronofsky, examines extreme athletes who test the boundaries of the human body.
“It was one extreme after another — a series of scientific experiments where I was the guinea pig,” Hemsworth previously told Entertainment Weekly. “I was just in awe of the individuals I was working with who did this day to day. But also, I gained a beautiful understanding and appreciation for how incredible the human body and mind is, and what potential we all have.”
Hemsworth added of the Arctic swim, “Immediately, I was like, ‘Never again.’ I ticked the box. I do plenty of ice baths, but there’s something different about putting your head under the water at the same time. If there was an emergency, there’d be something familiar about it. But for fun? Nah.”
His brother Liam Hemsworth also appears on the docuseries, which premieres today November 16 on Disney+.