Taika Waititi Reveals Who Is the Real Star of Thor: Love and Thunder

Thor: Love and Thunder is coming in 2021 and the announcement of the small details available about the film absolutely blew fans’ minds at Comic-Con this year. Now, Taika Waititi has revealed to MTV News which of the Thors will be the main attraction of the next movie. Will it be Chris Hemsworth‘s Thor or The Mighty Thor, who will be played by Natalie Portman. For the director, this one is a no-brainer.

Waititi told the outlet in an interview, “It’s Chris [Hemsworth]. It’s a Thor film. He is Thor, it’s a Thor film. She’s in it.” That seems pretty cut and dry as far as quotes go. The director was careful not to trip over any landmines over the course of the rest of this interview. They touched on the director’s involvement in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and how much of the next Thor script is done.

The team is only seven pages in, but fans are still stoked to see Natalie Portman wield the hammer as the Mighty Thor. Waititi spoke earlier this year about how he convinced the actress to make her return to the franchise. It turns out, there was only one simple question that he needed to ask.

“I just said to her, ‘Are you interested in coming back to this thing, but doing something really different?’” Waititi told Variety this year. “Because another thing, no one wants to keep repeating themselves and no one wants to play the same characters all the time. And I think for her, just coming back reprising that character but in this whole fresh new way, is really what I think would interest anyone. Especially, in most of these films, if you’re not a superhero… do you really want to keep doing that? I mean, I wouldn’t. I would want to come back and change things up.”

Marvel Studios head man Kevin Feige spoke to CNN about the upcoming Thor sequel during San Diego Comic-Con. He had a lot of praise for Portman and the story that allowed all of this to come together. Safe to say, the Marvel Studios President has a real appreciation for that run on The Mighty Thor.

“We love the story — it’s one of the best comic runs recently,” Feige explained. “[Director Taika Waitit] would flip through and read that run while he was doing Ragnarok. And I think when he agreed to come back and do another Thor, he was like, ‘How do we–?’ This is a very big movie that’ll be folding in a lot of elements. That is a huge important part of it. He pitched it to us, and we were totally in. We loved it. We’d been in touch with Natalie. She’s part of the MCU family and we put she and Taika together. It took one meeting and she agreed to do it.”

When looking at the timeline of Phase 4 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, many of the characters are headed for major shifts or have been taken out of the picture for the time being. Waititi’s comments here indicate that fans shouldn’t get too riled up about some of the possible changes. None of the creators are forgetting about the characters who laid the groundwork for the MCU.