So, you know how there was once the Era of All the Chrises? Pine, Evans, Pratt, Hemsworth. And they all looked the same, especially Pratt ‘n’ Evans and Pine ‘n’ Hemsworth (plus Hemsworth had 17 brothers who also looked the same, which felt like an unnecessary layer of complication). Then Evans became Captain America and Hemsworth became Thor and that sorted things out a tad, although Pratt ran interference as Star-Lord in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise for a bit.
Anyway. Limitless is a reality-documentary sort of thing by the Hemsworth one (if you need further elucidation, he is Australian and looks like a handsome teddy bear with an unparalleled fitness regime). In the first series he investigated ways to deal with stress and shock, and how to slow the ageing process and other ills that flesh is heir to. In the fifth episode, he found out he had two copies of the heritable gene for Alzheimer’s disease, making him eight to 10 times more likely than the average person to get it. This added an unexpected note of gritty realism to proceedings and seemed to give our seemingly otherwise invincible hero understandable pause for thought.
Now he is back with a shorter second series, Limitless: Live Better Now, looking at ways to improve not just his physical resilience but mental too. The three episodes cover ways in which to reformulate his approach to the chronic back pain he has suffered since he was a teenager, whether we can benefit from facing up to the things that most scare us and, in the opening instalment, how to protect ourselves against cognitive decline.
The expert consulted recommends learning a musical instrument as one of the best ways of keeping over-40-year-old neurons firing and synaptic pathways forming in a nicely plastic manner. There are also the emotional and social bonds that music can engender, she notes. “That depends,” says Hemsworth, who seems to have managed to retain to an impressive extent his antipodean dryness in the face of Hollywood excess, “how well you can play”.
He can, it turns out, already get by on the guitar well enough, so he needs something more challenging. His pal Ed Sheeran – a charmingly low-key unperformative friendship – tries him out on a few other instruments in his studio. They opt for the drums. It is a bold choice for a man without any notable sense of rhythm. Even bolder is the goal of being able to accompany Sheeran in a rendition of his hit Thinking Out Loud as part of his stadium tour in two months’ time.
Hemsworth recruits another pal to teach him how to play. His fellow Australian Ben Gordon is the drummer with the heavy metal band Parkway Drive and is chosen for his personal “Zen quality”. At the end of their first lesson, Gordon remarks that it is “pretty hard to find something Chris is bad at. But I think we’ve found it.” There is a chance, he says, that the audience’s favourite song “could be severely butchered by Chris”. To be fair, he does say it serenely.
Hemsworth’s lack of natural talent is soon coupled with a lack of time to rehearse amid all the other demands on his time. “Chris doesn’t really have his head around that yet,” says Gordon, serenely, of the chorus, as the weeks tick by. “He can’t just muscle his way through this,” says Gordon calmly, more weeks and less rehearsal time later.
A couple of weeks before the big night, Gordon has him rehearse with his Parkway Drive bandmates. “What’s becoming clear,” Hemsworth says at the end, “is that I really can’t keep time.” “You chose the wrong instrument, mate,” says one of the band, cheerfully. “It was a trainwreck.”
Somehow – and it is not my place to speculate on how this might have been achieved, perhaps with someone counting him in via earbud or frantically conducting just out of sight of the camera – it is alright on the night, and 70,000 paying customers do not have their night ruined and Hemsworth feels that the experience has future-proofed his brain in some small way. Hurrah!
The same goes for the techniques he is taught by a palliative care doctor and the triple amputee BJ Miller, the MMA champion Kim Dong-hyun, a training session with South Korean special forces and a Buddhist ceremony to cope with pain, and with his experience of climbing a 600ft dam in the Swiss Alps in the name of exposure therapy and testing his hyperfocus capacities. Good for him. He’s a warmly personable presence, even if he doesn’t much endanger the truism that actors are best when they are given a script to follow. But at least now we know for sure how to pick him out of a Chris lineup in an emergency. Just show them a drum kit and see which one quails.
• Limitless: Live Better Now is on Disney+ now
