Chris Hemsworth Gave a Career-Best Performance in ‘Furiosa,’ So Where’s His Awards Buzz?

One of the most delightful after-effects of Mad Max: Fury Road’s release nearly ten years ago was the fact that its gobsmacking craft made it a major player in that season’s Oscar race. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, and won six – the most of any movie that year, despite missing in the Picture and Director categories. By contrast, and unlike Dune: Part 2, the 2024 prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is seen as unlikely to pick up so much as a single Oscar nomination. (It didn’t even make the Best Visual Effects shortlist, apparently being less impressive in that regard than, uh, Deadpool & Wolverine. (Great work on the CG blood splatters, everyone.) It’s frustrating, because Furiosa is easily the better 2024 desert-set follow-up to a Warner Bros. sci-fi/fantasy franchise from a visionary director. (Sorry to the citizens of Arrakis.) And even if awarding another Mad Max-universe movie for its editing, costumes, makeup, and sound would feel old hat, there’s another category where Furiosa could and should compete where its predecessor did not: Best Supporting Actor, for one Chris Hemsworth.

Hemsworth is best-known for his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the superhero Thor, and he’s currently having a bit of a Netflix moment, with Furiosa and In the Heart of the Sea both chart fixtures in the past week-plus. Regardless, he’s sometimes struggled to find roles that fit quite so well as Thor’s particular (and sometimes surprisingly range-y) mix of handsome brawn, fish-out-of-water sweetness, and, in later entries, daft self-parody. Hemsworth can play more traditionally masculine stoicism, but it doesn’t often feel special in his hands, and he seems to have the most fun acting goofier, whether playing the ultimate dilettante himbo in the Ghostbusters redo or a charismatically menacing cult leader in Bad Times at the El Royale. Dementus, the aspiring warlord he plays in Furiosa, is the flipside to Thor: an equally cartoonish character with equally surprising depth and range of feeling.

Outfitted in an outrageous prosthetic nose and magnificent beard-and-mustache combo, Hemsworth may be feinting away from his good looks, that ritual so often performed by the terribly attractive when they want an award or some fun. But he wears these accoutrements naturally, as if adapting to his habitat, just as Dementus absorbs a burst of crimson dust on his cape and beard, happy with the modification. Hemsworth is unofficially competing with a great movie villain: the fearsome Immortan Joe from Fury Road, who also appears in Furiosa (played by a different actor, as the great Hugh Keays-Byrne passed away since Fury Road’s release). Rather than attempting to outgrowl his rival, Hemsworth plays Dementus as a different form of post-apocalyptic politician gone mad: a bloviator and a schemer, not without an occasional misplaced tenderness toward those whose lives he’s helped ruin, one grasping at the straws of power in half-weary acknowledgment that this is the game he must play. He’s also possibly a bit dumb (“a mug who can’t even keep his gangs together,” another character describes him). It’s a performance that depends on a paradoxical combination of Hemsworth’s movie-star charisma, and his generous willingness to look like an utter fool.

If there’s any further case against Hemsworth’s inclusion in the awards race, it’s that he rides the same category-confusion line as so many supporting nominees in recent years. He is the male lead of Furiosa, and if he doesn’t have more screentime than Anya Taylor-Joy, it’s probably close; he’s in four of the film’s five chapters, while Taylor-Joy is only in three (as she only plays Furiosa as an adult). Yet far moreso than many co-leads who parlay a deficit of five or ten minutes into a Best Supporting award, Hemsworth’s work as Dementus truly does support the journey of Furiosa from daughter of the green place to hardened revenge-seeker. We see plenty of Dementus’s literal wheelings and dealings throughout the movie, but he’s ultimately Furiosa’s target after he kills both her mother and her later-in-life partner, and he’s on the receiving end of Furiosa’s impossible demand: I want them back.

This exchange happens during the final chapter of Furiosa, where the movie fully transitions into the western it’s been hinting at for the hour previous. As their showdown approaches, Hemsworth still brings touches of humor to his portrayal; see the moment when, as Furiosa bears down on him and the remnants of his gang, he hilariously and unceremoniously dismisses them all as he lights out to save himself. When he is finally, haplessly captured by Furiosa, who he doesn’t initially recognize as the former surrogate daughter he kept in a cage, he delivers searing dialogue about pain and suffering, and how hers will not be quelled by killing him. Once he does realize Furiosa’s identity, he excitedly boasts of their kinship in a mini-monologue that Hemsworth recites with Shakespearean flair and intensity:

“You do this, you do this right, you become me. You are me! Already dead! To feel alive, we seek sensation, any sensation to wash away the cranky black sorrow. It leaves us for a moment, but then it comes back and we have to do it all again. And we need more, each time we need more until too much is never enough. We are the already dead, Little D. You and me. The question is: Do you have it in you to make it epic?”

C’mon, that should be Hemsworth’s Oscar clip! But maybe it’s appropriate enough that Dementus, second-tier warlord who admits he may not be as well-remembered as his “epic” charge, wouldn’t be honored with major awards attention. In true supporting-actor fashion, he enhances Furiosa, but George Miller’s world is so much bigger than one man, or one silly trophy.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.