Updated October 26, 2026
Chris Hemsworth weighs 215 pounds when he plays Thor. That is his own figure, given to Bodybuilding.com in 2013, and the only body weight he has ever attached to the character. The same interview gives about 185 pounds for Rush, reached in four months so that Ron Howard could fit him into a 1976 Formula One car. Everything else on his chart is calories, meals and a 90-pound silicone suit.
Here is the sequence, role by role, in his words and his trainers’. The headlines got two things wrong. The “fat Thor” of Endgame was prosthetic, and the biggest Hemsworth has ever been was, by his trainer’s account, the version he liked least.
2011: Thor, “for years I probably over trained”
The first Thor was built by a surfer who had never lifted seriously. Bodybuilding.com reported in May 2011 that Duffy Gaver, the trainer who had built Brad Pitt, put 20 pounds of muscle on him; when the site interviewed Gaver in 2012, the figure had become 25. The method was to “lift big and eat bigger,” on “huge amounts of chicken and red meat.”
His own verdict came a decade later, to The Telegraph in April 2021: “For years I probably over trained. […] I was doing that in the previous Thors, and was coming up sorer, with less energy.” The 20-versus-25 question has never been settled, because the one person who could settle it has never weighed in.
2013: Rush, “I don’t know if Thor is going to fit into a race car”
Ron Howard’s first line to him, Hemsworth told Bodybuilding.com in 2013, before the only cut he has described in numbers. “I went from 215 pounds, which is how much I weigh when I’m playing Thor, down to about 185 pounds to be able to fit into the car. That was all in about four months.” He swapped weights for long-distance running. His review: “I’d rather put on weight any time.”
Then straight back for Thor: The Dark World: “I bulked up for about eight weeks and then slowly cut down for maybe a month or so,” on “buckets of protein, brown rice, vegetables” every three hours. Eating when not hungry was exhausting, “but I much preferred it than my Rush diet.” By the time the film opened in November 2013 he was already on his way down again.
2013 to 2015: In the Heart of the Sea, “you go to bed hungry”
Howard’s whaling drama needed sailors who had drifted for 90 days, and Hemsworth did the arithmetic on Jimmy Kimmel Live in early November 2013. “We have to get rather skinny. So we’re on 500 or 600 calories a day.” That bought “a couple of small salads, a couple of small pieces of protein and that’s kind of it and you go to bed hungry.” To Entertainment Tonight he gave a wider range, “500, 600, 700 calories a day, a good three or four weeks,” and this: “I spend more time thinking about food than anything else at the moment.”
On November 22, 2015, with the film about to open, he posted the photo of himself at the bottom of the diet, ribs showing and a ragged beard, with a caption that remains the most honest piece of promotion the movie got. He has never given a weight for it; the “33 pounds in four weeks” on fitness sites has no source he ever spoke to, and this page does not use it.
https://twitter.com/chrishemsworth/status/668417450946375680
2019: Endgame, a 90-pound suit and weights on his ankles
The most talked-about Thor body was the one he did not build. He told Variety in its May 28, 2019 cover story that the “Lebowski Thor” of Avengers: Endgame took “a good three hours in hair and makeup,” then “the prosthetic suit, particularly for the shirt-off scene, that was a big silicone that weighed about 90 pounds. It was certainly exhausting. I had weights on my hands and ankles just to have my arms and legs swing differently when I shuffled along through the set.” Hemsworth fought the script to keep him heavy for the whole film. It is the only time a studio has paid to make him look like he skipped the gym, and he seems to have had the best time of his career inside it.
2021 to 2022: Love and Thunder, “bigger than I’ve ever been”
Lockdown gave him a year with nothing to do but train. “This is probably the fittest and strongest I’ve been before all the Thors,” he told The Telegraph in April 2021, and explained where the muscle goes: “we consider the costume and if it shows a lot of shoulder, or are we gonna see the bicep or the traps. […] You don’t want to look like Popeye with one section of the body blown up.” On June 1, 2021 he called wrap with a photo beside Taika Waititi and a joke about “national don’t flex day.”
@chrishemsworth That’s a wrap on Thor Love and Thunder, it’s also national don’t flex day so I thought this super relaxed photo was appropriate. The film is gonna be batshit crazy off the wall funny and might also pull a heart string or two. Lots of love, lots of thunder! …
By the July 2022 release he was telling USA Today where the size had come from. “It came from boredom, sitting in COVID lockdown was like a prison. It was train, eat, train, eat. Nothing else to do. Then I turned up for the film bigger than I’ve ever been.” Luke Zocchi, his longtime trainer, gave The Independent the mechanics in June 2025: ten meals of 450 calories a day, 4,500 in all. Entertainment Tonight’s write-up of the USA Today interview said 6,000 a day; Hemsworth never gave a number, so both figures sit in Rumor / Reality below.
Zocchi’s other admission is the one the fan accounts skipped. “Chris felt uncomfortable with how big he was on that one, and he wasn’t enjoying how much food he had to eat,” he said; the weight got in the way of his surfing. “It might have been the last time he played Thor, so we wanted to look massive and we had a year to train for it.”
2022 to 2024: Limitless, “not a pre-deterministic gene”
The body story turned into a health story in November 2022. Filming the Disney+ series Limitless, he took a genetic test; the result, delivered off camera by the physician Peter Attia, was two copies of the APOE4 gene, one from each parent. He told Vanity Fair, in a piece published November 17, 2022, that it made him “eight to 10 times more likely” to develop Alzheimer’s, and in the same breath set the limit on that sentence: APOE4 is “not a pre-deterministic gene, but it is a strong indication.” The show, he said, “triggered something in me to want to take some time off.”
In the gym, he told Men’s Health in October 2023, “I’m lifting less frequently than I was, and I’m incorporating more cardio and endurance workouts, which I much prefer than heavy body building style sessions.” “It really kind of p—ed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,” he told Vanity Fair in an interview reported on May 2, 2024. “No matter how much I said, ‘This is not a death sentence,’ the story became that I have dementia and I’m reconsidering life and retiring and so on.”
2020 to 2025: the Hulk Hogan body that never got built
In July 2020 he told Total Film that the Todd Phillips biopic of Hulk Hogan would be “insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor.” In August 2024 Phillips told Variety, “I love what we were trying to do, but that’s not going to come together for me,” and Hogan died on July 24, 2025, at 71. Hemsworth’s biggest body on paper stayed on paper, which, given how he felt about the previous record, may not have been a loss.
2025 to 2026: Avengers: Doomsday, “when I am Thor I just eat more”
The current build is the first designed around not repeating 2021. Zocchi told The Independent in June 2025 that the two of them “haven’t pushed anywhere near as hard on this film”: weights one day on, one day off, boxing and steady cardio between, four or five meals a day instead of ten. Hemsworth posted the warm-up himself on May 1, 2025, a boxing clip captioned “A little Avengers pre game warm up, coming in hot.”
@chrishemsworth A little Avengers pre game warm up, coming in hot 💪👊 @centrfit @marvelstudios
Asked on The Graham Norton Show on January 30, 2026 how he gets in shape for it, he gave the shortest version of this whole page: “I train six or seven days a week for my health and mental wellbeing and when I am Thor I just eat more. Everything hurts a bit more now I am 42, but it is fun and I love it.” Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026.
Where this leaves him
Hemsworth’s chart has two hard numbers on it, 215 and 185, both from a single interview thirteen years ago. The rest is appetite, described with unusual candor: 500 calories for Howard, ten meals for Waititi, a 90-pound suit for the Russos, and a trainer who finally said out loud that the biggest version was the unhappy one. At 43 he has settled on a body that can still surf, which is a more specific brief than “look like a god” and a perfectly good one. The next time someone writes that he is “bigger than ever,” check the date. He has been there and asked not to go back.
Sources
- Bodybuilding.com (archived): Race God to Norse God, Chris Hemsworth interview (215 lb as Thor, 185 lb for Rush, four months, Dark World bulk quotes), 2013
- NBC News: Chris Hemsworth on 500-600 calorie diet (Jimmy Kimmel Live quotes), Nov 6, 2013
- Variety: Chris Hemsworth on playing fat Thor in Avengers: Endgame (90-pound suit, Lebowski Thor), May 28, 2019
- The Independent via AOL: Luke Zocchi on the Love and Thunder diet (ten 450-calorie meals) and the Doomsday plan, Jun 24, 2025
- CNN, quoting Vanity Fair: two copies of APOE4, “eight to 10 times”, “not a pre-deterministic gene”, Nov 17, 2022
