Chris Hemsworth likes metal – this much we know. The Thor star has talked about how much he loves Metallica and Pantera, even admitting to damaging his neck while headbanging when he was a young kid.
But now the guy who throws around a superpowered hammer in the Marvel movies has taken things one step further by getting Parkway Drive’s Ben Gordon to teach him how play the drums for a brand new Disney+ series.
“The task is set,” explains Hemsworth in a teaser clip for the show, Limitless: Live Better Now. “I’ve got around two months of prep until I have to go and play with one of the biggest performing acts on the planet. So, I need one hell of a teacher.”
Enter Gordon, who has played with the Byron Bay metalcore band since their inception in 2003.
“He’s a good mate of mine and lives in the same town as me,” continues Hemsworth. “And he’s the drummer for Parkway Drive, one of the biggest metal bands in the world.
“He’s incredibly talented, but with quite a sort of Buddhist approach to it all. There’s a Zen quality to Ben that I love, which is such a contrast to the music he plays. And he’s going to be my drum teacher.”
Gordon elaborated on how this unlikely gig came about to The AU Review. “We became friends six or seven years ago when he moved to Byron Bay,” the Parkway Drive man said. “We’ll go for a wave together when we’re both home, which is not very often to be honest
“This experience has made us much closer, that’s for sure, because we were spending so much time together. It’s great to get to know Chris better, but yeah, it is quite random.”
And the superstar musician Gordon is teaching Hemsworth to batter the drums into submission for? Uh, that’ll be Ed Sheeran, who the actor joins for a show on the UK singer’s stadium tour.
Now Sheeran is a lovely guy by all accounts, and he’s joined Limp Bizkit onstage and collaborated with Cradle Of Filth on a yet-to-be-released track, but it’s unlikely that Hemsworth will be needing to bust out Mjölnir for the occasion.
According to reports, the episode features Hemsworth joining Parkway for rehearsals, to the growing frustration of frontman Winston McCall, who becomes increasingly frustrated with his inability to keep time.
“I’ve never seen Winston be the bad guy”, Gordon told The AU Review, adding: “Chris told me afterwards that he was thinking, ‘Wow, these guys are full on’, he said he didn’t know if we were being real or not.”
Check out the results of Hemsworth’s Parkway-approved drum lessons – and his appearance with Ed Sheeran – on Limitless: Live Better Now, currently streaming on Disney+.
Parkway Drive’s 20th anniversary European tour begins on September 19 in Leipzig, Germany and hits the UK on October 4.
