Chris Hemsworth has taken the blame for the failure of Thor: Love and Thunder ahead of his lead role in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which premieres globally in Cannes in mid-May.

In a wide-ranging cover story in this month’s Vanity Fair (VF), the Australian actor, 40, said he “became a parody” of himself and owes the audience another Thor after his fourth standalone role in the 2022 Taika Waititi-directed film.

“I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he said.

“I didn’t stick the landing.”

He admits he doesn’t want to be “an overly self-important, pretentious wanker”.

Robert Downey Jr, who played Ironman in the franchise, defended his colleague, and said his friend’s work in Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame was “a formidable hat-trick”.

Hemsworth apparently “still can’t forgive himself” for Love and Thunder.

For the record, the film grossed $US761 million at the global box office off a budget of $US250 million, while film critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it just a 63 per cent approval rating because of its “silliness”.

In a bid to move away from a decade of eight Marvel films (he’s made 27 feature films to date), Hemsworth recalls meeting director George Miller after seeing the 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road blockbuster in London with his wife Elsa Pataky.

“Oh god, my mind was completely somewhere else in terms of who might play Dementus,” Miller tells VF of who would play his lead character alongside Anya Taylor-Joy, the young Furiosa.

At a meeting in Sydney later that year, Miller said they “talked for hours about psychology and philosophy and the personality disorders that make a villain not just dangerous but intriguing”.

“What surprised me was the depth of his insight about work, the world at large, himself, and it came effortlessly out of the conversation.

“I had this sense that there was a way more complex, considered person than I’d ever imagined meeting.”

Chris Hemsworth (with George Miller) tells Vanity Fair he wants to be taken seriously by directors like Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Photo: Warner Bros.

In 2020, the New South Wales government and Miller (Hemsworth included) launched Furiosa at Fox Studios in Sydney, and by 2022 production began across regional towns including Silverton, Broken Hill and Hay.

More than 850 local jobs were created, stunt crew and sets took over huge swathes of windswept open country, and about $350 million was on the cards for the NSW economy.

Hemsworth, who had put Thor out of his mind, and had limped to the end of location shoots and post-production for Extraction, says as soon as he got to rehearsals on set, “everything lifted”.

“I just got reinvigorated,” he said.

“Suffering without a purpose is awful. Suffering with purpose can be rejuvenating and replenishing. I’d grown so tired of myself, and now I had to lose myself in a character.”

VF reports Miller got his actor to read books like Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator and to write journals as Dr Dementus, the weird bikie lead in the movie.

“I had never done that before,” Hemsworth admits.

“I had always thought I didn’t need it, rolled my eyes in the past. Too self-serious. But I think by having that attitude, I kind of missed an opportunity to do a deeper dive into character development.”

Miller “adored” how Hemsworth developed a “mid-20th-century accent” from his grandfather’s generation for the role, and together the pair “dug into Dementus’s nasty human core”.

Prosthetics also helped transform the handsome Hemsworth into a raging desert-dweller. Photo: Warner Bros.

He says Hemsworth had a steadying hand on location, and “whenever there was a weather problem, he was on set … he brought the whole cast around him”.

He also got on famously with several ex-cons, who had enjoyed their spare time in a theatre group while in prison, and whom Miller cast as Dementus’s sidekicks.

“It was a wonderfully eclectic group of personalities, and I became really close with my little gang,” Hemsworth said.

Hemsworth reveals he wanted to be an actor because he wanted to be like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, Patrick Swayze in Point Break, or Robert De Niro in Heat.

Miller could see a transformation in Hemsworth, and how he came to own the acting rights to Dementus.

“It was really, really weird turning up on set for several months getting used to Dementus,” Miller said.

“When I saw Chris many months later, my first instinct was ‘Wait a minute, this is not Chris Hemsworth. This is a fraud’.”

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15 and is in cinemas nationally from May 24