‘That’s definitely a dig at Chris’: Luke Hemsworth finally plays the funny guy

Luke Hemsworth only has a handful of scenes in the new season of Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney’s critically acclaimed crime comedy Deadloch. But, in some ways, it’s a job he’s been chasing for 25 years.

“I called Kate McLennan when I was maybe 20 years old at university,” says Hemsworth, speaking via Zoom from the expansive lawn of his home in Byron Bay. “I wanted to do more comedy and [didn’t] know the first steps.”

This was well before the Kates (as they’re now widely known) became a sensation with The Katering Show and brekky-TV satire Get Krackin. It was also years before the world would become cognisant of the concept of a Hemsworth. Luke, who has since found a home in action and sci-fi, landed his first job on Neighbours around this time, but younger brothers Chris and Liam were still in high school. The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t exist. The Hunger Games books were yet to be published, let alone adapted to the screen.

“[McLennan] was basically like, ‘Who the hell is this guy? How did you get my number, bro?’” Hemsworth jokes. He recalls she gave him good advice – watch a lot of comedy, just start performing – but when he brought up the conversation when the Kates approached him for Deadloch, she didn’t remember it.

“It would have been much better for my ego [if she did],” he says, laughing. “But, you know, 20 years later I’m picking her brains every day. It’s pretty cool to be the funny guy.”

Whether you’re watching the show or speaking with him in real life, it seems comedy comes naturally to Hemsworth. So it’s strange his biggest performances have been so serious. After moving to LA in the early 2010s he had his big breakthrough playing stoic security chief Ashley Stubbs in Westworld, and he’s played hardened military men in most roles since. Next month Hemsworth stars alongside Daniel MacPherson and Russell Crowe in gritty MMA sports action drama Beast.

But he’s clearly up for having a dig at that macho persona. In Deadloch’s second season, which takes the murder-mystery from Tasmania to the Top End, Hemsworth plays a slimy celebrity croc wrangler who speaks down to women and exploits people while taking every opportunity to talk himself up.

“My mum was a feminist – we were brought up very hard in that sensibility,” Hemsworth says. “My dad spent his whole life protecting children. There’s a naughty glee being the guy who’s saying all this horrible stuff.”

The actor drew on his own impressions of “enormous and over-the-top” characters he met living in Arnhem Land as a kid (where his dad worked in child protection services), and then later in the Kimberley, where he worked on a pearl farm. But he’s happy to admit he also threw in an explicit drive-by of Russell Crowe.

Jason Wade, a TV personality interviewed by Kate Box’s sedate detective Dulcie Collins in relation to a case, is about to “do a series where we drive a fast car over a salt lake, just back and forth – me and big Russ”. He’s also apparently climbing K2 and Everest for “Nat Geo”, a show that sounds suspiciously like Chris Hemsworth’s series Limitless (which Luke has also starred in).

Hemsworth sets the record straight: “I can’t remember if we threw that in or the Kates wrote it but that’s definitely a dig at Chris.”

And which guy is likely to take the joke better?

“They’re both pretty upset about anything I have to say about them. Neither one of them has any sense of humour,” he says with a cheeky grin.

Hemsworth goes on to explain he was actually “really devastated” he couldn’t make the scheduling work to appear in A Road Trip to Remember, last year’s National Geographic documentary in which Chris and their dad filmed a motorcycle journey to their old home in the NT.

“I won’t talk about that, though,” he says of the doco, which dealt with his father’s recently diagnosed Alzheimer’s. “[Dad] will get upset and then I’ll be in everyone’s bad books.”

It’s a serious topic. Hemsworth describes the episode as “beautiful” and “absolutely heartbreaking”. But when I ask if his dad doesn’t like the attention of it being talked about in the press he’s quick to milk a laugh: “Nah … he can’t remember it anyway.”

‘Working here provides a level of ease for me as an actor … Americans don’t understand Australian humour.’

Luke Hemsworth

After years in the US, Hemsworth has been enjoying being back home – like his brothers, he now lives in Byron Bay. And he loves local work, such as Deadloch, when he can get it.

“I can’t think of any other show that goes so hard with dark humour and that extreme level of profanity,” he says, praising the Kates’ scripting of Eddie Redcliffe, an abrasive cop played by Madeleine Sami. “It’s like Shakespeare. It feels quite abrasive at the start. The first five to 10 minutes you have no idea what’s happening. And then your brain clicks over … and it’s addictive. That’s how I feel when Mads is on-screen … Mads and Kate [Box] are just absolute icons.

“There’s something about working here that provides a level of ease for me as an actor. Americans and Australians, we speak the same language but culturally we’re quite different. As fantastic as they are, Americans don’t understand Australian humour.”

Hemsworth is an ambassador for Central Coast Studios, a $260 million film and TV production precinct that’s being planned in Calga in NSW. Some of his rationale is selfish, he says. He wants to make as much work here as possible and sleep in his own bed at night.

But the actor hopes it will also offer more opportunities for young and independent filmmakers who can’t always shoot on location or aren’t getting time in other studios booked by bigger productions, as well as crew who can work closer to their families.

Hemsworth does, however, have one exciting international title in his sights. “I’m not officially part of it yet,” he says, “[but] it’s a dark comedy, a take on the superhero genre, which is very cool.”

It wouldn’t be his first superhero film. He starred as an Asgardian actor playing Thor, a winky understudy for his brother, in Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder. Was there no room on the call sheet for him in the coming Avengers: Doomsday?

“I tried!” he says, laughing. “[No room] for lowly me.”

Deadloch is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.