Being part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe certainly looks like hard work. Playing a superhero requires constant hours in the gym. It means doing a lot of physically exhausting work on set. It means wearing a potentially uncomfortable superhero costume. However, for Chris Hemsworth, it turns out that the hardest part of the job isn’t all the physical exertion, it’s when you do the audio recording of all the physical exertion.
Playing Thor requires more than a few grunts, groans, screams and shouts. And because a lot of those noises are needed for off-camera scenes, or because an actor is running around or getting punched in the face, the audio recording for them is usually done after the fact. This ADR is referred to in the industry as “efforts” when an actor comes in to record all the various noises their character makes while they are exerting effort. CinemaBlend caught up with Chris Hemsworth on the red carpet at SDCC and he told us efforts were the most exhausting part because of the way they destroy his voice. He explained…
The efforts are exhausting. Every time I do efforts, I sit there and… those who don't know, efforts is basically all the sound effects for fight scenes and, you know, punches and car crushes and whatever. You do an hour of ‘ooh’ and ‘ugh.’ Your throat is destroyed. And I've done 10 or 12 years of it. And each time I do it again for another movie, I'm like, ‘Can't you just call the last film? Because it's the same sounds! I don't care what character it is, he gets punched with the same kind of UGH noise.’ They all say no. Even with the Marvel films. I'm like, Thor 3, Thor 4, like, we did this last film. And they're like, ‘No, we want our own.’ And so it's exhausting. I always do it at the end of the session. Because if you do it at the beginning, you can't speak for a few hours.
Honestly, while I would never have guessed that this could be the most exhausting part of making a superhero movie, hearing Chris Hemsworth describe it, I totally get it. We know voice acting is harder than it seems, often for many of these same reasons, and that's very similar to what's going on here. It sounds absolutely awful. And any action movie is going to have a lot of this kind of stuff, so recording just these noises would be rough.
Why can’t they use the sounds from the last movie? Between four Thor movies and four Avengers movies, Chris Hemsworth has been in a lot of Marvel movies and you’d think they have enough of a library of noises that they could use. It’s not like they’d need to reuse only a small handful of sounds. If there was anything unique in a new film Hemsworth could just do a few new sounds, then the film could pick the best choices from the pile for everything else. However, that's not how it works.
What the future holds for Thor in any upcoming Marvel movies is unknown. However, we do know that if we do see him again, Chris Hemsworth is going to have to do a whole new round of throat-destroying sound effects. The next time I watch all the Marvel movies in order I'm going to be thinking about these sounds in a whole new way.
