Chris Hemsworth went shockingly 'all in' as a villain in his new 'Mad Max' film 'Furiosa'

Chris Hemsworth is ready for his close-up. And for such a handsome guy, it’s not a pretty picture.

The man who would be Thor sports a beak-like nose and slightly rotting teeth as the villainous Dr. Dementus in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (in theaters Friday).

“That was the character’s look in the storyboards, and to his credit, Chris went all in with it,” says George Miller, the brilliantly twisted orchestrator of the dystopian 45-year-old, five-film "Mad Max" franchise.

Miller says his star also used contact lenses to obscure those dazzling baby blues, and was fine being featured with a long beard and a mane of hair that turns decidedly ratty as the tale progresses.

Sign up for our Watch Party newsletter:We deliver the best movie and TV recommendations to your inbox

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

The end result is a glimpse at the action heartthrob’s darker side, which he spices up with humor as Dementus takes on other futuristic wasteland gangs at the helm of a chariot drawn not by beasts but by motorcycles.

“Not recognizing the person in the mirror helps you transform, and it was such a great departure for me,” says Hemsworth, 40.

Miller was shocked by the metamorphosis of both Hemsworth and co-star Anya Taylor-Joy, whose youthful title character is on a revenge-fueled hunt for Dementus in the prequel to 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which starred Charlize Theron as an adult Imperator Furiosa.

The sheer intensity of Taylor-Joy’s almost dialogue-free performance coupled with Furiosa’s signature shaved head (a touch created by Theron, who told Miller such a heroine “would never do battle worrying about long hair”) made the “Queen’s Gambit” star all but unrecognizable to the veteran director.

“Meeting with Chris and Anya on the press tour every day was strange because they felt like imposters to me,” says Miller, 79. “They’re not the same characters I spent a year with.”

Anya Taylor-Joy worked out for a year so she could pull off her stunts in 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga'

Miller’s latest epic misadventure is once again set in an ecologically ruined future somewhere in the badlands of central Australia. Mad Max himself has no part in the tale, which focuses on Furiosa’s origins in a green utopia led by women.

She is kidnapped by Dementus’ grizzly gang and grows up watching his expansionist dreams slowly come true, which only stokes Furiosa's murderous visions that need no justification.

Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”) landed the job before she shot to wider fame in Netflix’s 2020 chess prodigy series and immediately hired a personal trainer to get into fighting shape. She worked out for a year before hitting the set.

“George asked me, ‘How willing are you to do the physical work?’ And I said, ‘I’ll do anything you need,’ ” says Taylor-Joy, 28, who also got her driver’s license so she could perform car and motorcycle stunts herself.

“I don’t think I have ever worked so hard in my life,” she says. “But I really wanted to do this.”

Australian native Hemsworth felt the same way. “I dreamt of (being in a "Mad Max" movie), I wished and I hoped and I begged. It holds a special place in the heart," he says.

Miller leveraged what Hemsworth describes as his “naturally very fidgety nature, which I normally have to conceal in films but here I could let that all out.” The result is a Dementus who is perhaps the most human of ruthless killers in ages.

Taylor-Joy says for her character, Miller was “keen to have me hold my face in a specific way, so that really only left me with my eyes to convey my emotion.”

Her Furiosa exudes a fearless intensity that is equaled perhaps only by the performance given by the other Furiosa. But Taylor-Joy deliberately did not seek a meeting with Theron before or during filming. “That was out of respect for her performance. But now, I’d say we both are due a dinner, a very long dinner,” she says with a laugh.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth shot a lot of 'Furiosa' in locations George Miller used in the first 'Mad Max' movie

No doubt, the "Mad Max" alums would have many stories to tell. The saga spans so many decades that sometimes the various "Max" worlds overlap.

For example, Hemsworth says that many “Furiosa” scenes were shot in the desert landscape that was used when Miller, along with a just-out-of-theater school Mel Gibson, cobbled the 1979 original on a shoestring budget.

Beyond the always-bonkers action sequences inherent in each "Mad Max" movie, there is also a clear underlying message about how humans treat each other.

“It’s an entertaining movie foremost, but I think the hope is that people will ask big questions in spite of it all,” says Taylor-Joy. “I see all the 'Mad Max' movies as cautionary tales. Look, a world where compassion is a detriment to survival, where empathy is punished, where nothing grows, that’s not a place I want to live.”

Chris Hemsworth checked on Anya Taylor-Joy constantly during their brutal showdown sequences

But it's a world in which Furiosa thrives at the film's climax. After a long pursuit of Dementus, Furiosa finally hunts him down and a wasteland showdown ensues. The scenes also were one of the few times the two were on the set together.

The result was an odd mix of movie mayhem and genuine caring, they say.

“I still laugh about it, here we have this vicious back and forth as the cameras roll, and then it was ‘Cut!’ ” Hemsworth says with a smile. “And I’m saying, ‘Are you OK, I hope I didn’t hit you too hard, and what are you up to on the weekend?”

“I remember that, too,” says Taylor-Joy. “It’s like we were trying to take care of each other while we were also trying to mutilate each other.”

Pretty much a perfect summary of the world according to "Mad Max."