Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth’s Kids Helped Create ‘Thor’s Monsters

Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi's latest Thor installment would be nothing without their children, since they had inspired the creative direction in which the monsters look in Love and Thunder.

According to writer/director/Korg, the fourth stand-alone Thor movie not only features cameos by several cast members' kids, but a "cool and weird" set of shadow monsters inspired by their hand-drawn designs.

"Here's a fun fact, I haven't talked about this at all," Waititi teased. "This is a world exclusive for you, People magazine. The monsters in the film were originally based on drawings that all of our kids did. I was typing the script and my daughter kind of leaned over and she was like, 'What's an oil monster?' That's like the first thing I could come up with [when] I was writing. I said, 'I have no idea. I just wrote oil monster, whatever that means.' And she goes, 'What do you think that looks like? Do you think it's spiky?' And then she draws this like snakey thing."

Hemsworth added, "And then Taika said to me, 'Tell your kids to do some drawings,' and they did some drawings."

Hemsworth shares daughter India, 10, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, 8, with his wife, Elsa Pataky. Waititi has daughters Te Kāinga o te Hinekāhu, 10, and Matewa Kiritapu, 6, with ex Chelsea Wistanley.

After their kids drew for Waititi, he then gave the drawings directly to the visual development artists working on the VFX for the film. "They turned them into these fully rendered, wild monsters," he said. "In some of the kids [drawings], they were super colorful. So we toned those down. But yeah, that's why the monsters are so weird and look so cool. That's why the monsters look like they were created by kids."

Thor: Love and Thunder is out in theaters this Friday, July 8.

The World Premiere for Thor: Love And Thunder took place last night (June 23), and for fans of the franchise, star Chris Hemsworth said he hopes to continue the role for more films, especially if he can carry on working with director Taika Waititi.

“I’ll do it until someone says get off the stage. I love it,” the actor told Deadline. Hemsworth added of fans’ continuing love for his character, “There’s an adolescent quality to him, a sense of adventure. And a sort of fun immaturity. [Working with Waititi] it’s something different each time, something fresh. And he’s a dear friend. He has the same sort of immature quality I was talking about. In the best way possible.”

Natalie Portman reprised her role as Jane Foster and said of Waititi’s reimagining of her character to become the next Thor, “Taika imagined this change in Jane and it was a really great proposition that he had to join his wild ride. It was amazing to get to be challenged with that because I don’t think there’s many people who would cast a 5ft 3 woman as a 6ft character, so it was great to be able to get to imagine how someone who’s that big walks through the world, certainly not the same as me, always looking up at people, who always feels like a kid in every situation.”

Christian Bale said of the difficulties installing the long nail extensions for his villainous character, Gorr the God Butcher, “It rendered me completely incapable of everything. I was pathetic. I found myself thinking things like, ‘I don’t think I can walk because I’ve got long nails.’ It affected my brain. I was like, ‘I can’t eat, I’ve got long nails.’ I was trying to type. I couldn’t do anything.”

Thor: Love and Thunder arrives in theaters July 7. See the stars at the World Premiere below: