Chris Hemsworth on Limitless, longevity, and happiness

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Chris Hemsworth. Many of you need no introduction to Chris, of course, and most of you probably know who he is through his work as Thor in the Marvel movie series. You've also likely seen him in no shortage of other movies out there. And of course, my absolute favorite movie with him is Rush.
I wanted to sit down with Chris to talk specifically about his work in the recent project through National Geographic called Limitless, which is now available on Disney Plus. Prior to the beginning of filming for Limitless, which was in January 2020, I didn't know Chris, but over the past three years, I've gotten to know Chris very well and consider him a very close friend. And it was great to sit down with him in New York as we were both there for the premiere to talk about everything that had gone into the making of this series. Chris and I had kind of an ongoing joke over the past few years where we would refer to the series Limitless by another name, Relentless, because it really, in some ways, felt like this was never going to end. In part, of course, that was due to COVID, but in part, I think it was because the creative team behind this had such an amazing vision for what this could be. And frankly, the version of Limitless that you all have seen is a significantly better version than I think the one that was conceived back at the beginning in 2020 So as I said, given that we were both in New York for the premiere, we wanted to take advantage of that and sit down and talk about this. Unfortunately, time was not completely unlimited and there were constraints. And so as much as I wanted to do a really deep podcast with Chris and talk about everything in his life beyond Limitless, we simply didn't have the time given how much of Limitless we wanted to talk about. So in this episode, we really just focus on Limitless, the challenges that he went through in a variety of the episodes. And particularly talk about how they've impacted him to this day. In addition to the conversation with Chris, we sprinkle in a variety of clips from Limitless throughout the interview process, depending on the topics that we're covering. While this lends, I think, to a better watching experience of the interview, we're purposeful in choosing clips from Limitless that would add value to even those of you who are just listening to this in audio format. And of course, if you haven't checked out the series, I recommend you do so. As I said, it can be found on Disney+. So without further delay, please join my conversation with Chris Hemsworth.
So good to sit down with you, brother.

**Chris Hemsworth** (3:08)
You too. Thanks for having me.

**Peter Attia** (3:09)
So much to talk about, but I feel like I just want to start with kind of getting a sense of the first time you heard about this. Was it a call from Darren? Like how did you even get involved in this project?

**Chris Hemsworth** (3:20)
Yeah, I had a call from Darren. It'd be going back on three years now. He said, I want to do this series, a docu-series called Limitless on longevity. And he said, I know you're a fit, healthy guy, but we want to dive into the science and put you in some pretty extreme, intense physical, emotional situations and see how you fare. And you can be the guinea pig as far as the longevity science goes.
I said, why not?
And initially it was supposed to be about a three week shoot.
And I know you and I have talked about this a lot. Once COVID hit, the show got spread out over two and a half years and really it transformed in the best way possible due to having hell of a lot more time than I think we'd first anticipated. We were able to flesh out each episode, explore the science in greater detail. I was able to grow throughout the experience and have different opinions on myself, different opinions on how I approached health and wellness. So yeah, I'm really proud of how it turned out. And I think it was a lot due to the time span we were able to shoot it on.