Chris Hemsworth has become one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He’s achieved a dream that a lot of people strive to accomplish. The actor credits a single-minded drive for helping him to achieve his success, though he also admits that the same drive caused him some problems.
Hemsworth recently appeared on the Jay Shetty podcast for an in-depth discussion of his career. The Thor actor, who will return to the role again in next year's Avengers: Doomsday, admitted that his career has caused him significant anxiety at different points. It all started because he says his initial decision to go into acting became a personal obsession. Hemsworth said…
I remember when I first started acting, I had… once I sort of locked into the idea that I was going to become an actor, it was an absolute obsession. It was an addiction. It was all I talked about. There was no shadow of a doubt that was what I was going to do.
To a certain extent, Hemsworth says the obsessive nature of his drive to become an actor was beneficial, if only because he didn’t really stop to consider how difficult becoming successful would actually be. At the same time, he says that to achieve that kind of success, a certain amount of “madness” is essentially necessary. He continued…
There was an ignorance and a naivety that was there, about the reality of how difficult that was going to be. But you need a fair amount of madness, I think, to excel at any space, there needs to be a certain amount of absolute deeply profound commitment to it.
Hollywood is certainly a highly competitive world. Countless people would like to achieve success, but only so many people can. Even outside of the big movie stars, the actors who are simply able to make a living as actors without having to supplement their income is quite small compared to those who try to do it. It certainly requires a certain dedication that not everybody is going to have.
However, Hemsworth says this obsession caused its own problems, as he found himself afraid that any slight misstep could ultimately be the move that cost him the career he wanted. This ultimately caused significant anxiety problems that he still deals with, something his Avengers co-stars have also had to deal with. The actor said…
Everytime I go into a job, as small as it was, and inconsequential, I was like, ‘If I screw up this one scene, it will somehow make its way to Hollywood from Australia, and I’ll never get a job again.’ It was that kind of pressure. I was thinking 10 years ahead.
While this drive certainly helped Chris Hemsworth, it also led to anxiety. He says that when he was cast on long-running soap opera Home and Away, a launch pad for many Australian stars, it was wonderful for a while... until he started to dwell on every perceived mistake he was making, to the point that it was all he was thinking about.
In the end, Hemsworth says he had to do a “dance” that would see him caring deeply in his preparation for the work, while then being able to let go of it after it was done. It’s still something that he says he works to deal with, but clearly, it was a solution for him, as he ultimately achieved exactly the success he wanted.
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