Due to a not-so-great audition, Chris Hemsworth almost lost his chance to play the god of thunder. Even worse: he almost lost the part to his younger brother. "Months went by and then my brother, my little brother, Liam, was in Australia and sent a tape across and he got a call back, then another call back and then was down to the last kind of four or five people for it," Hemsworth revealed in a September 2017 interview with W. "I came in kind of with a little, I guess, motivation and maybe frustration that my little brother had gotten further than me." When he did finally get a callback, Hemsworth delivered and landed the role.
Hemsworth had also come "very close" to landing the title role in GI Joe at the time (as he told Variety in May 2019), which would have kept him from taking on Thor.