Fat Thor Covers “Hurt”
By this point, I don’t need to put out spoiler warnings to talk about Avengers: Endgame, right? It’s the biggest fucking movie. If you haven’t seen it, you are being willfully obstinate. So: One of the remarkable things about Endgame is that the movie makes a visual punchline out of depression — Thor is sad about not being able to save the world, so he loses himself in beer and video games and puts on a bunch of weight — and then keeps that punchline going for the whole movie. Chris Hemsworth, one of the most absurdly handsome people that you or I will ever encounter — spent the entire movie in a giant beard and a fatsuit. Maybe that’s problematic! I don’t know! But what starts out as a joke becomes an actual character choice. Thor remains lost and crushed through most of the movie. And apparently, Hemsworth had to do something to keep himself in that space. So he did the natural thing. He sang “Hurt.”
Last night, Hemsworth was a guest on The Tonight Show. He was promoting the new Men In Black movie, in which he is neither fat nor Thor. It looks terrible! But he ended up talking about Avengers: Endgame and sharing some footage that he shot on his phone while he was in the trailer. To get himself into that depressed place, he busted out an acoustic guitar and sang “Hurt” — the Johnny Cash version, not the Nine Inch Nails version. And in his Fallon appearance, he showed that footage like it was a clip from an upcoming movie.
It would’ve been cool to see Hemsworth do the whole Fallon/Neil Young thing and sing the song in character onstage, but that didn’t happen. Still, pretty fun! Watch it below.
Between this, “Old Town Road,” and that one Black Mirror episode, this is turning out to be the summer of Nine Inch Nails. And Trent Reznor didn’t even have to leave his house!