The making of Thor: Love and Thunder was truly a family affair for the cast and crew. Writer/director Taika Waititi told People magazine that when he was writing the Marvel movie‘s script, his daughter provided some unexpected inspiration.
“I was typing the script and my daughter kind of leaned over and she was like, ‘What’s an oil monster?'” Waititi shared. “That’s like the first thing I could come up with [when] I was writing. I said, ‘I have no idea. I just wrote oil monster, whatever that means.’ And she goes, ‘What do you think that looks like? Do you think it’s spiky?’ And then she draws this like snakey thing.”
Waititi loved her picture so much that he then told star Chris Hemsworth to get his kids drawing, too. From there, the drawings went straight to the film’s visual effects artists, who used them as inspiration for the monsters that appear on screen throughout the movie. “That’s why the monsters are so weird and look so cool. That’s why the monsters look like they were created by kids,” Waitit said.
Waititi has two daughters, 10-year-old Te Kāinga o te Hinekāhu, and 6-year-old Matewa Kiritapu. Hemsworth, meanwhile, is dad to three kids: 10-year-old daughter India and 8-year-old twin boys Sasha and Tristan.
All five lucky kiddos were fixtures on the set of the movie, even getting cameos. Hemsworth’s two boys got to play younger versions of Thor, while his daughter played a character named Love. According to Vulture, Waititi’s kids as well as those of Natalie Portman and Christian Bale, were also on-camera.
Hemsworth said having all those children around made filming more relaxed. “You can get caught up in the sort of making a movie,” he told People. “It’s serious and there is pressure and whatever, and the kids come in and they just pull the rug out and they go, ‘This is ridiculous, come on.'”
You can catch the kids’ cameos and see how their artwork translated into movie monsters when Thor: Love and Thunder hits theaters on July 8.
