Chris Hemsworth responds to headlines claiming Alzheimer’s is making him ‘quit Hollywood’

‘It really kind of pissed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,’ Hemsworth says

Chris Hemsworth has addressed the claims that he is quitting Hollywood.

The Thor star was speaking to Vanity Fair for the magazine’s May cover when he discussed the rumors that he would be retiring from acting after it was revealed that he discovered his genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s.

Two years ago, the actor underwent genetic testing during the National Geographic docuseries, Limitless, where he found out that he carried two copies of the APOE4 gene. Carrying the gene does not mean that Hemsworth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but that he is at risk for it.

“It really kind of pissed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,” he told the outlet about the headlines, which were not true. “No matter how much I said: ‘This is not a death sentence,’ the story became that I have dementia and I’m reconsidering life and retiring and so on.”

Despite the inaccurate reports of him quitting acting, Hemsworth acknowledged that there were some funny comments from fans in response to the headlines.

“I did read a really funny comment at the bottom of one article: ‘I hope Chris forgets he’s retiring and comes back,’” he recalled.

At the same time as the news was going around about his genetic predisposition for Alzheimer’s, Hemsworth was also taking a break from acting because he was “exhausted, and I wanted to be home with my family,” he revealed to Entertainment Weekly in June 2023.

“It was interesting, because those two headlines got coupled together, that I was taking time off because of the genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s,” he told the outlet at the time. “That experience and that show [Limitless] made me go: ‘Oh wow, none of us are invincible.’ It kind of slams you into the moment.”

“It was a positive in that sense, but it got a little over-dramatised, like I was potentially retiring because of this thing. Which just isn’t the case,” Hemsworth said.

Previously, Hemsworth spoke with Vanity Fair in 2022, where he talked more about what it was like to receive such a sudden diagnosis.

“They took all my bloodwork and did a bunch of tests and the plan was to on-camera tell me all the results and then talk about how you can improve this and that,” he said at the time.

“And Peter Attia, who is the longevity doctor in that episode, and overseeing a lot of the show, called [show creator] Darren [Aronofsky] and said: ‘I don’t want to tell him this on camera. We need to have an off-side conversation and see if he even wants this to be in the show.’

“It was pretty shocking because he called me up and he told me.”

Hemsworth explained that he had certainly not expected to receive such “intense” news as the show was originally intended to be a “fun” way of exploring “longevity”.

However, he said: “It was a really good catalyst to dive into everything I needed to be doing in either the prevention front or the management front.

“There was an intensity to navigating it. Most of us, we like to avoid speaking about death in the hope that we’ll somehow avoid it.”