Chris Hemsworth has been a mighty Thor many times but to return to his black ops mercenary Tyler Rake in the “Extraction 2” sequel, streaming Friday on Netflix, was something different.
“Extraction,” adapted from a graphic novel, introduced Rake, a former Australian Army Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) operator turned rescuer-for-hire, recruited to save an incarcerated drug dealer’s son in Bangladesh.
The novel ended with Rake dead. The movie followed suit. “When we began the original script, the character was done by the end, riddled with bullets, a piece of Swiss cheese toppling off a bridge. That completion felt necessary for the story of this redemption tale,” Hemsworth, 39, said in a Zoom interview Monday.
Rake didn’t stay dead for long. Before filming finished, Hemsworth and director Sam Hayward “started talking about if we ever did another one, what the character would do. How the world could expand.
They decided, “We should give ourselves an out in case audiences respond. So at the very end of shooting, we added a little piece to indicate the character was alive.
“Then,” the Melbourne native noted, “the film was the biggest film on Netflix at the time,” making a sequel inevitable.
“It was like telling an origin story for the second time — because the story’s emotional components were only the tip of the iceberg in the first film.
“We didn’t really understand or know a lot about where he was from, what his backstory was, what drives him. That unraveling — and a closer examination of who the character was — was really exciting to me.
“Probably the most exciting thing (because) we knew the action was going to be there and I knew Sam was going to elevate it even further.
“But to have a story that had more depth and was able to have something an audience could relate to was important and exciting.”
Tyler Rake is indeed different now. “What I liked is we had a character that had, for whatever reason, a very hard exterior surface. But underneath he’s bottling emotions and trauma, unable to express and share any of that with anyone.
“In this film, you see him opening up. Some healing does occur. For me that is something that I’m glad we’re allowed to explore onscreen. I don’t think 10 years ago you could have had a male action hero cry onscreen. Be vulnerable. Show emotion. And that is problematic for society, across the board for everyone involved.
“So I’m proud of the fact that we were able to explore that and show different facets to the character.”
“Extraction 2” streams on Netflix Friday
