In the Sam Hargrave–directed film, Hemsworth plays soldier-turned-mercenary Tyler Rake, a lethal weapon of a man who’s been psychologically blunted since a past tragedy. With nothing left to lose, he accepts a suicide mission to rescue a kidnapped boy (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the son of an imprisoned crime boss, from the drug lord holding him captive in Bangladesh. But even as Rake wages a one-man war against a criminal underworld’s worth of corrupt cops and killers, he senses that getting the boy out alive may be his last shot at redemption.
Between its haunted protagonist and a triple-digit body count (not to mention a distinct lack of capes), Extraction finds Hemsworth operating in a grittier, more grounded vein, alongside longtime Marvel stunt coordinator Hargrave and Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo (who wrote the script and produced). Dirt-caked, blood-soaked, and punishingly intense, it’s a particularly far cry from the sprawling, CGI-enabled spectacle of later, larger Avengers movies.
For Hemsworth, part of Extraction’s original appeal was to bring him back down to human size after years of playing a nigh invincible superhero on-screen, demanding a grueling physicality that more special effects–driven pictures had not.
“I didn’t want to just do a straight-up action film,” Hemsworth tells Fortune, speaking alongside Hargrave via a joint Zoom call last week. “I wanted to do action unlike anything I’d ever done before, which this required. It was a level of complexity and exhaustion that was very new.”
Here is a video on how Hemsworth was able to pull off such crazy stunts. Watch video here: