“When I walk in the room, I have to be very specific about who I am. But it still gets confusing,” says Luke Hemsworth. “Every now and again someone calls me Liam.” In an interview with The Guardian, the Australian actor opened up about being the oldest brother of one of cinema’s best-known families, humorously recounting what it was like growing up alongside little brothers Chris Hemsworth and Liam Hemsworth.
Despite his best efforts, he still sometimes gets confused with his actor siblings: “I actually got introduced at the Beast premiere as Liam Hemsworth by Rob Carlton,” Hemsworth said. “I’m going to call him out! Fuck you, Rob! He came up after and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I had a brain fart.’”
In Beast, Hemsworth plays Gabriel, a “dirtbag” mixed martial arts fighter with a dirtbag goatee. Hemsworth revealed to The Guardian that all of his siblings enjoy MMA and UFC. “It was a big part of growing up in my household with my idiot brothers, being able to protect myself from the wild throws and kicks that they’d send my way,” he said. An informal hobby turned into a passion over time: The actor dabbles in boxing, Brazilian jujitsu, and Muay Thai. To this day, the tradition continues: “Every Sunday, I’m usually at either my place, Chris’s place, or Liam’s place, and it’s UFC Sunday,” he said. “There’s always a lot of shouting at the TV, and usually we all end up wrestling.” Which Hemsworth brother is the strongest? “Liam will tell you he’s never been beaten at wrestling, but don’t believe a single word he says,” he told the Guardian reporter.
Among his other childhood memories, one in particular has stuck with him. “I also remember watching The Exorcist in our house in Sassafras when I was about 12 or 14,” Hemsworth said, calling it “the most terrifying film that I’d ever seen.” What made the experience even creepier was the atmosphere at home: “When it was windy, the windows would kind of flex and go boink.”
Hemsworth’s first great cinematic love falls into a very different genre. “The NeverEnding Story is probably one of my favorite films of all time,” he said. “It’s the first VHS I remember actually receiving as mine, when I was maybe five or six years old. We watched that film until the tape stopped playing. The scene where Artax the horse gets stuck in the swamps of sadness? It’s so iconic, and heartbreaking and fantastic. To this day, I still remember being very upset about that.”
Along with his favorite movies, Hemsworth shared some of the best advice he’d ever received from a fellow actor. “I had breakfast with Anthony Hopkins once. He invited me, and I was like, I’m going to go have an awkward breakfast with Anthony Hopkins and try not to soil myself with terror,” Hemsworth said. “We got talking about me wanting to do certain projects and how my agents were saying that I shouldn’t do them. And his advice was, ‘Fuck them!’ He said, ‘Fuck them. Do what you want. Why are you listening to that? Fuck them.’ And I was like, that’s actually pretty good advice!” A very sound piece of advice, indeed, although the Westworld star admitted it may not have always worked.
Hemsworth also talked about his love of literature, calling himself a science fiction fan. “There’s a book series called Red Rising by a guy called Pierce Brown. He’s a sci-fi writer and a Roman historian, and he was like, What if the Romans expanded into space?” he said, explaining that it is “the most entertaining, inventive sci-fi [works].” Hemsworth enjoys Red Rising so much that he rereads the series often. And to the reporter’s question about what accent the Romans might have in space, he wryly replied, “Like mid-Atlantic with a little bit of British?”
From the outside, the Hemsworth surname may seem like an advantage, but the eldest Hemsworth brother shared that in reality it’s more complex. “I think there’s an assumption that life is easy if you have the Hemsworth name, that you’re gonna get roles super easily. In my experience, it’s actually been a lot more difficult, and it comes with a stigma,” he explained. “I have to be very aware of my craft, making sure I’ve really prepared. That sounds like a no-brainer, but I’ve had to really work, really dive deep into that part of my game.”
Acting aside, the main point of comparison between himself and his two famous brothers is his height. At five feet nine inches, he is quite a bit shorter than both Chris and Liam, who are both six feet three inches. “There is kind of baggage that’s left over from [Chris and Liam],” he shared with a laugh. “Most of it is, ‘Oh, you’re really short!’”
