“Hi, I’m Anthony Russo.” “And I’m Joe Russo.” “And we are the directors of ‘Avengers: Endgame.’ This is a scene that happens relatively early in the film where we are catching back up with our characters after a five-year time elapse once they have definitively lost to Thanos— after he’s eradicated half of all life. Everyone’s taking that occurrence badly, of course, but some are taking it worse than others. Thor blames himself for the loss in many ways. And he’s basically masking it. He’s hiding in things like alcohol, and food, and video games, and TV. And he’s cloistered himself in this cabin here, and he’s very much hiding from the pain that he can’t face.” “Boys! Oh, my God! Oh, my God, so good to see you! Come here, cuddly little rascal. [GRUNTS] “Yeah, no, I’m good. I’m good.” “I think why this is one of our favorite scenes in the movie is this is an exceptional performance from Hemsworth. One of the hardest tones to play as an actor is to play both pathos and humor, and he does it with such a delicate touch in this scene. You really have to commit to stakes, you have to commit to emotional truth in order for the performance not to get ridiculous. That’s why it’s so difficult, because it can go absurd on you very quickly. And he does it. He grounds it. And this is right around the section where he starts to ground the performance.” “And he’s grounding it, of course, surrounded by a bunch of CG actors, which is doubly hard to pull off.” “And while wearing a 30-pound body suit.” “Yeah. And Joe and I, as filmmakers, we love to play with tone. We like very complicated tones. And this scene, I think, is really juicy for us because it starts from such a silly, absurd, frivolous place in terms of how Thor is hiding, what kind of behavior he’s adopted to get away from the pain.” “So what’s up? You’re just here for a hang or what?” “We need your help. There might be a chance we could fix everything.” “Well, like the cable? Because that’s been driving me bananas for weeks.” “Like Thanos.” “And this is a moment right here where, in a single moment, when Hulk says ‘Thanos,’ you see Chris Hemsworth reveals to us the pain that he’s been masking.” “He’s a tragically haunted man. And the tone shifts there very, very delicately.” [SOMBER MUSIC] “Don’t say that name.” “Even Korg shifts tone and becomes part of the conversation in this moment.” “The scene has a wonderful shape to it in the sense that we start from a place of lightness. It moves to a place of real darkness. And then at the end, there’s some kind of bizarre reconciliation of the two.” “Why would I be? Why would I be scared of that guy? I’m the one who killed that guy, remember? Anyone else here killed that guy?” “To get a peek into the window of how we would shoot a scene like this. So we didn’t have Taika on set that day, so there’s a motion capture actor playing Korg. We voiced Taika later. Ruffalo’s on set wearing, basically, the equivalent of pajamas which are a motion capture suit. And we have him on a platform so he can move around at the height he needs to move around at so he can have eye contact with Hemsworth. And when Hulk touches Hemsworth, we just replaced that with a Hulk hand instead of Ruffalo’s hand. And then we have— James Gunn’s brother plays Rocket on set. He’s crawling around on the ground on his knees so that he can also be at the same height as Rocket. So it’s very complicated to pull off a scene like this, and then to add in these difficulty-in-tone complexity of performance for Hemsworth, and this is about as a high degree of difficulty as it gets for an actor.” “You also notice the room— for as funny as this scene is, the room is very moody and dark. I think that really speaks to the fact that there’s a duality going on in this scene, and that ultimately, the story lies in Thor’s pain. And that that’s really what we’re moving here through on a story level here, and what this character is trying to push through. You’ll notice that the screen is blurred, and that’s because of some obscure rights issue. ‘Fortnite’ is actually playing on that screen, but for some reason in this clip, we can’t play it.”