What Chris Hemsworth Was Like Before All The Fame

After getting back on Branagh's radar, Hemsworth knew he needed a killer audition tape, and he pulled it off thanks to his mom. "I was on the 17th floor of a hotel in Vancouver with my mom reading the lines to me," he told The Hollywood Reporter, "and something great must have happened. It got me back in the room."

"We did two or three interview sessions before we tested him," Branagh said. "We pretty much knew as we were shooting the test that he was the guy. It seemed, across these meetings, he had grown into it. He understood it better. And crucially, he was at ease."

Having his mom help him land his biggest role must've been a special moment for Hemsworth. Especially considering he started acting to help out his parents after watching them struggle for years to make ends meet.

"We grew up with very little money and that kind of frustrated me as a kid listening to my parents talk about bills every week and sort of seeing the sort of weight that put on them," he told W Magazine. "I thought, 'That's it. I'm gonna make money and pay off their house.' So I thought, 'I'll be an actor,' and very naively kind of ran into that world and started auditioning."