Chris Hemsworth was glad to “dirty it up” and leave his superhero persona behind for Furiosa

Earlier this week, Chris Hemsworth lamented the fact that he “became a parody of [him]self” and “got caught up in the improv and the wackiness” while filming Thor: Love And Thunder. It’s no wonder, then, that the actor jumped full throttle at the chance to finally play a no-holds-barred villain in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, George Miller’s upcoming prequel to 2015's Fury Road.

One of his main attractions to the part, “besides working with George,” was just “to dirty it up and to be messy and ugly and violent and chaotic, rather than being in the somewhat predictable box of the hero in a superhero space,” Hemsworth said in a recent Entertainment Weekly cover story. “There’s a whole lot of rules that you have to stick to [with that]. With this, I could throw that out the window, which was nice.”

Hemsworth isn’t afraid to name names—or impractical outfit choices—either. “It was a real departure, and it was nice…” he said, before apparently catching himself. “I was about to say it was nice not to wear a cape, but… I did have a cape in this film. And it’s red—or it becomes red eventually, as well. The absurdity of that.” While that costume choice wasn’t “intentional to be a comparison of Thor,” it sounds like the happy accident was pretty healing for the actor. “I found a wonderful departure to it—to play the villain, transform, and inhabit a completely different physicality was a lot of fun. I loved it,” he elaborated.

And Hemsworth really does transform in this film. He’s almost unrecognizable in its trailers as Dementus, the grimy, unhinged warlord who plucks a young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) from her verdant childhood home. “It’s one of the only times in my entire career that a male costar has been in the makeup chair for as long as I have,” Taylor-Joy joked with the actor, who wears both a tangled wig and prosthetic nose for the film, amongst other dirt and muck. But while this left-turn initially “scared the shit out of [him],” we may still be in for more villainous Hemsworth in the future. “I feel like I learned more on this film than anything I’d ever done because of what was asked of all of us and how challenging it was, in a wonderful way,” he said.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga speeds into theaters May 24.