Chris Hemsworth surprisingly went all out as a villain in his new “Mad Max” film “Furiosa.”

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

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

“That was what the character looked like in the storyboards, and to Chris’s credit, he really embraced it,” says George Miller, the brilliant conductor of the dystopian “Mad Max” series, which has spanned five films over the past 45 years.

Miller says his star also used contact lenses to cover up the bright baby blues, and had no problem being portrayed with a long beard and a mane that becomes decidedly shaggy as the story progresses.

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The end result is a glimpse into the dark side of the action swarm, peppered with humor, as Dementus takes on other futuristic wasteland gangs at the wheel of a chariot pulled not by animals but by motorcycles.

“Not recognizing the person in the mirror contributes to the transformation and for me that was a big departure,” says Hemsworth, 40.

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

The sheer intensity of Taylor-Joy’s almost dialogue-free performance, coupled with Furiosa’s signature shaved head (a creation of Theron, who explained to Miller that a heroine like her would “never go into battle for fear of long hair”), made the star of The Queen’s Gambit almost unrecognizable to the veteran director.

“It was strange meeting Chris and Anya every day on the press tour because they seemed like imposters to me,” says Miller, 79. “They are no longer the same characters I spent a year with.”

Anya Taylor-Joy trained for a year to perform her stunts in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”

Miller’s latest epic misadventure is once again set in an ecologically devastated future somewhere in the badlands of central Australia. Mad Max himself does not appear in the story, which focuses on Furiosa’s origins in a green utopia run by women.

Kidnapped by Dementus’ cruel gang, she grows up to watch his dreams of expansion slowly become reality, which only fuels Furiosa’s murderous visions that need no justification.

Taylor-Joy (“The Witch”) landed the job before she rose to fame in the 2020 Netflix series about chess prodigy and immediately hired a personal trainer to get in fighting shape, training for a year before going on set.

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

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

Australian-born Hemsworth felt the same way. “I’ve dreamed about it (to star in a ‘Mad Max’ film), I’ve wished for it and hoped for it and begged for it. It’s something close to my heart,” he says.

Miller took advantage of what Hemsworth describes as his “naturally very fidgety nature, which I usually have to hide in films, but here I was able to let it all out.” The result is a Dementus who is perhaps the most human of the most ruthless killers in a long time.

Taylor-Joy says that for her role, Miller “required me to hold my face in a certain way, so that I was basically left with only my eyes to express my emotions.”

Her Furiosa exudes a fearless intensity that is perhaps only matched by the performance of 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 would say we both deserve a dinner, a very long dinner,” she says, laughing.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth shot many “Furiosa” scenes in locations that George Miller used in the first “Mad Max” film

There is no doubt that the Mad Max alumnae would have many stories to tell. The saga spans so many decades that the different Max worlds sometimes overlap.

Hemsworth, for example, says that many of the “Furiosa” scenes were shot in the desert landscape that was used when Miller and Mel Gibson, fresh out of theater school, cobbled together the 1979 original on a shoestring budget.

Beyond the crazy action sequences that are inherent in every Mad Max film, there is also a clear message about how people treat each other.

“First and foremost, it’s an entertaining film, but I hope that despite everything, people ask big questions,” says Taylor-Joy. “I see all the ‘Mad Max’ films as cautionary tales. You see, a world where compassion is detrimental to survival, empathy is punished and nothing grows is not a place I want to live in.”

Chris Hemsworth constantly looked for Anya Taylor-Joy during her brutal showdown sequences

But it’s a world that Furiosa thrives in at the film’s climax. After a long chase of Dementus, Furiosa is finally able to hunt him down and they have a showdown in the wasteland. The scenes were also one of the few where the two were on set together.

The result was a strange mixture of cinematic chaos and genuine compassion, it is said.

“I still laugh about it. We have this vicious back and forth while the cameras are rolling, and then it’s ‘Cut!'” Hemsworth says, smiling. “And I say, ‘Are you OK? I hope I didn’t hit you too hard. And what are you doing this weekend?'”

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

Pretty much a perfect summary of the world of Mad Max.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The cast of ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ talks about the film’s brutal stunts and showdowns