Thor - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[duane]

"Mjölnir" is ancient Norse for "grinder".

[nora]

The post-credits scene was directed by Joss Whedon to connect The Avengers (2012) with this movie.

[christina]

The agent that grabs a bow and arrow when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is attempting to recover Mjölnir is referred to as Agent Barton. This is Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), also known as the archer Hawkeye.

[christina]

This is Rene Russo's first movie in six years. According to Russo, it was her daughter who persuaded her to work on the movie, after a long sabbatical.

[steve]

Sir Anthony Hopkins claims he relates to his role of Odin: "I'm a little like Odin myself. He's a stern man. He's a man with purpose. I play the god who banishes his son from Asgard, because he screwed up. He's a hot-headed, temperamental young man, probably a chip off of the old block, but I decide he's not really ready to rule the future kingdom, so I banish him. I'm harsh, and my wife complains, and I say 'That is why I'm King'".

[clayton]

Tom Hiddleston described his role of Loki as "a comic book, but nastier version, of King Lear's Edmund." In the William Shakespeare play, Edmund was the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, who was jealous of his legitimate brother Edgar, and tricked his father into banishing him into exile.

[gerald]

(At around nine minutes) It's mentioned that Thor's Hammer Mjölnir was forged inside "a dying star". This actually makes a modicum of scientific sense. When a very large star dies in a supernova, sometimes its remains collapsed to form a "neutron star". These objects cram the mass of the sun into the size of a city, forming a new kind of matter nicknamed "neutronium". A single teaspoon of this material would weigh billions of tons. If Mjölnir was made of this material, it would certainly explain its incredible weight.

[leo]

According to Sir Kenneth Branagh, Odin runs the Marvel Universe. It was Odin who hid away the Tesseract in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and an Infinity Gauntlet in The Avengers (2012).

[lena]

Tom Hiddleston researched Marvel Comics' Loki, and found him to be a multi-dimensional character, and based his performance as Loki on three different actors: Peter O'Toole (enigmatic reckless persona), Jack Nicholson (edgy and nearly insane persona), and Clint Eastwood (persona with simmering anger).

[francisco]

Thor refers to Agent Coulson as "Son of Coul", misinterpreting his surname as "Coul's Son", in the way Norse cultures construct surnames (Odin's son becomes Odinson, et cetera).

[scarlett]

In the original script, Loki revealed himself to Laufey as his son, and Laufey then admitted his abandonment of him. This was left out, to make Loki more devious.

[ava]

Thor's hammer Mjölnir is cast out of Asgard and lands in New Mexico. This was based on the comics (Fantastic Four #536), where in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event on Asgard, Mjölnir was cast out to land in Oklahoma, where it lay until Thor came to reclaim it.

[claude]

(At around twenty-eight minutes) Director Sir Kenneth Branagh was inspired to do the scene where Odin rips off Thor's chestplates from The Life of Emile Zola (1937), where a disgraced Army officer was stripped of his rank.

[brent]

To prepare of the role of Fandral, Josh Dallas drew inspiration from renowned swashbuckler Errol Flynn and his movies: "Flynn had a lot of that boyish charm that Fandral's got all that in him." The comics' characterization of Fandral was also based on Flynn.

[sara]

Sir Kenneth Branagh conceptualized this movie as a Norse and comic book twist on William Shakespeare's Henry V (1989), which was about a young King who underwent trials and tribulations: fighting a war, courting a girl from another land, trying to live up to the example set by his father (a beloved King), and basic character development.

[nicholas]

(At around forty-three minutes) As Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is leaving the restaurant to go to the crater site, and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) follows him, you can see a small water tower at the end of the street that says "Welcome. Home of the Vikings."

[michele]

According to producer Kevin Feige, the Bifröst bridge is this movie's most interesting set: "In the comics, it's literally a rainbow that extends out from Asgard and pops down on Earth. We're not necessarily doing that. We're not having the big hard solid lines of colors. We're saying it's some sort of energy, almost a solid quartz bridge that, as the light catches it, and flows through it, you get some of that rainbow-esque quality to it."

[harry]

According to Chris Hemsworth, the action coordinators experimented with different combat styles, but ultimately the fighting technique Thor utilizes is an original one, based on boxing: stance low to the ground, with big powerful hip movements.

[willard]

According to director Sir Kenneth Branagh, this movie's biggest challenge was connecting the worlds of Asgard and twenty-first century Earth: "It's about finding the framing style, the color palette, finding the texture and the amount of camera movement that helps celebrate and express the differences and distinctions in those worlds. If it succeeds, it will mark this film as different. The combination of the primitive and the sophisticated, the ancient and the modern, I think that potentially is the exciting fusion, the exciting tension in the film."

[claude]

In the 2014 "Thor" comics, Loki was designed to look like Tom Hiddleston for a brief time.