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'Sea' star Chris Hemsworth calls movie-studio water tank a 'theme park from hell'

By Karen Butler
Ron Howard, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Holland and Benjamin Walker arrive on the red carpet at the New York premiere of "In the Heart of the Sea" on December 7, 2015. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
Ron Howard, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Holland and Benjamin Walker arrive on the red carpet at the New York premiere of "In the Heart of the Sea" on December 7, 2015. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

NEW YORK, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- Chris Hemsworth says it was easier to film scenes for his 19th century-set maritime adventure In the Heart of the Sea on the actual ocean than it was to work in a movie-studio water tank.

"The stuff in the ocean, I kind of loved. It was difficult on the whale boats because, logistically, getting on and off them was so diifficult and tricky and that is when we were at our hungriest and you were just sitting in the hot, beating sun, and you're either soaking wet or dry, and you've got the beards glued on and falling off and that was kind of uncomfortable," the 32-year-old Australian actor told reporters in New York recently.

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"But I've got to say, being out on the ocean, and that period of the shoot, I did kind of love, as well. As challenging as it was," he recalled. "The hardest stuff, I thought, was in the tank in London because it was freezing and there were a lot of night shoots and we were basically just... It felt like a theme park from hell -- being shot by water cannons and flipped out of boats and [director] Ron [Howard] was on the loud speaker and we couldn't even hear. That was just sort of chaos. We thought the stuff on the ocean was going to be trickier, but I think the stuff in the studio ended up being more challenging because you are dealing with all the technical machines and things and so on, whereas on the ocean we just had to adapt to whatever the environment was doing and sort of get on with it, which was nice."

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In the Heart of the Sea opens Friday. Based on the true story that inspired Herman Melville's classic whale tale Moby-Dick, it co-stars Ben Walker, Tom Holland, Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy.

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