Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth takes to the high seas in Ron Howard's latest movie In the Heart of the Sea. The actor re-teams with the Rush director to bring us the remarkable true story of the Essex, a 19th century whaling vessel that was rammed and sunk by an enraged bull sperm whale. The incident would in turn inspire Herman Melville's landmark novel Moby Dick.
As one might expect, authenticity was everything when it came to making the movie, Hemsworth along with fellow stars Cillian Murphy, Benjamin Walker and Tom Holland all immersed in the gritty realities of life on the high seas. In fact, the beefy actor dropped his calorie intake to depict his character's eventual emaciated state when stranded in the vast ocean.
"The 500-calorie period was only for a couple of weeks," he tells The Belfast Telegraph. "If you do it for four weeks, someone told me, you start to mess with your metabolism. So I think we did it the healthy way."
The actor says making the spray-drenched movie presented a formidable challenge: "I lost a lot of weight for Rush, as I'd come off the back of Thor, but this was even more intense. Plus, Rush was very glamorous in the sexiness of it all, whereas this was brutal and raw. We were wet 90% of the time and exhausted. Really cold when we shot in London, really hot when we shot in the Canary Islands, and then you're just in rags."
Nevertheless, Hemsworth promises a brawny drama that will do justice to an extraordinary tale of survival. "It's this epic, seafaring adventure with a beautiful backdrop and real edge-of-your-seat sequences, but it's a drama at the heart of it and you don't see that combination very often," he says.
Get a taster of the movie by scrolling down to watch the trailer. In the Heart of the Sea is released on 26th December.
