This post contains spoilers for Thor: Ragnarok

“I feel like I’m dying here. I feel like I have handcuffs on,” Chris Hemsworth recalls telling his boss, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige. The role of Thor, hammer-swinging Norse god of thunder, may have transformed Hemsworth from an Australian TV actor to a worldwide, household name—but the actor describes himself pre-Ragnarok as “frustrated and bored.” After critically-mixed outings in Thor: The Dark World and Avengers: Age of Ultron, the crimson-caped Avenger had lost his mojo. But at a meeting that some in Hollywood might consider unusual, Feige not only listened to his star’s concerns—he took notes.

“It has to be funnier; it has to be unpredictable,” Hemsworth remembers saying. “Tonally, we’ve just got to wipe the table again.”

That reset for Thor—and a massive infusion of improvisational humor—comes courtesy of Ragnarok director Taika Waititi, who has helped transform Marvel’s most stately and straitlaced property into a zany, no-holds-barred adventure that gives Guardians of the Galaxy competition for the oddball crown. Hemsworth’s first two solo movies, more staid and Shakespearean in tone—noted Bard expert Kenneth Branagh directed Thor’s debut—even inspired in-universe ribbing courtesy of Tony Stark: “Uh, Shakespeare in the Park?” Robert Downey Jr.’s character snarked at Thor in The Avengers. “Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?”

Taking the idea of “Ragnarok”—the Norse concept of destroying the world and building it anew—to heart, the third installment in the Thor trilogy actively, and sometimes cheekily, rips apart everything we once knew about Hemsworth’s character.

Feige, for one, was not concerned about Thor’s dramatic Ragnarok makeover. “When we started Hemsworth on Thor,” Feige tells me, “he has blond hair; he has a hammer; he has a cape. These are the things that make Thor. He has now appeared as that character so many times [that] Chris Hemsworth is Thor. So we cut his hair, we got rid of his hammer, and it’s still him.”

It was Hemsworth idea to “cut his hair” and “destroy the hammer”—moves that Waititi, whom Hemsworth describes as also being “sick” of old Thor, wholeheartedly endorsed. Hemsworth credits Kevin Smith, whom he once heard bashing the Thor franchise on a podcast, for inspiring him to speak his mind to Feige. “Hearing someone like Smith, who represents the fanboy world, was such a kick in the ass to change gears,” Hemsworth says. “We sort of had nothing to lose. People didn’t expect what we did with it this time around.”

Ragnarok takes Hemsworth’s hope for a new start to extremes by letting Anthony Hopkins’s Odin die and Asgard crumble to bits. The love of Thor’s life, Jane (Natalie Portman), and her human companions Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), don’t appear at all; they are written out of the narrative with a single tossed-off exchange. Thor’s faithful companions, the Warriors Three—a.k.a. Fandral (Zachary Levi), Hogun (Tadanobu Asano), and Volstagg (Ray Stevenson)—are bumped off with not much more screen time and minimal fanfare. The cape is ripped, the bulky armor his face is disfigured, and there’s a new woman in his life: Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie. In essence, the only Thor accessories to survive the original films are his adopted brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and a significantly more rough-and-tumble version of the gatekeeper Heimdall (Idris Elba).