As I work on a larger piece about Warner’s ongoing DC “problem,” I saw a story scroll past that made me smile. It’s not news so much as a bit of backstory that makes a scene that we saw in a recent movie seem even sweeter.
We ran a story about one of the post-credit scenes in “Thor: The Dark World,” the one that exists largely to drop a few narrative bread crumbs for next year’s “Guardians Of The Galaxy,” but that was just one of the two scenes that were hidden during the credits for the film.
In the other one, we see that Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is still sitting at the breakfast table in her English apartment when there’s the familiar sound of the Rainbow Bridge opening up and depositing Thor back on her balcony. She runs into his arms, they embrace, and some serious making out commences. It’s a nice swoony punctuation mark at the end of the film, and it seemed appropriate since one of the signatures of the “Thor” films seems to be palpable sexual tension between Jane and Thor, something that not every superhero series is able to pull off.
Today, though, Portman shared a story that set that scene in a different context. Turns out that was one of the reshoots, something that seemed likely looking at the last third of that movie, and it happened at a point where Hemsworth and Portman were working on opposite ends of the planet. Marvel couldn’t work it out to get the two of them together, and since the movie is called “Thor,” they decided Hemsworth was the one they couldn’t live without.
So who stepped in for Portman as a body double to do the smooching stunt? Elsa Pataky, aka Mrs. Chris Hemsworth. Portman told The Daily News, “They put his wife in my wig an costume. That’s why it was so passionate.” That may be the single sweetest story we’ve heard in recent memory about solving a logistical issue during the production of a movie, and it certainly makes the Hemsworths sound like a happy couple.
“Thor: The Dark World” is still in theaters.