Chris Hemsworth rides up on a horse, reins in one hand, face shining in the Australian sun. We’re on a pristine stretch of beach near his house. Our last gallop took me by surprise, my feet flapping wildly out of their stirrups, and Hemsworth wants to make sure I feel safe. He tells me to steer my horse into the Pacific if I don’t know how else to stop. This gallant little scene captures the fantasy of Hemsworth: pop culture’s sunny, reliable hero. But the best stuff about him as a person—the funny, messy, human stuff—lives beneath the glossy surface. Later, he’ll say of our rollicking morning on the beach, “I had a moment of, Oh, I can catch her if she falls off. That’ll be good for the story. And my next thought was, No, you’ll fall over before she will, and she’ll have to catch you.”

Hemsworth and his family live in Byron Bay, a surf town just south of Australia’s Gold Coast where men walk barefoot into nice restaurants and all the women have long, sun-streaked hair and not even the old people look old. Everyone is fit and beautiful and drinks green juice, and maybe it would all be alienating if people weren’t also so warm and kind. When I tell my hotel receptionist that I’m in town to meet Hemsworth, she smiles approvingly. “He’s one of us,” she says. “Just like any of the other surfers down at the beach. Doesn’t carry on or put on airs. Looks like my mate’s brother, you know?”

I meet Hemsworth at his house, where he waits for me in the driveway, his bare feet immune to the hot pavement. He’s got the whole afternoon to talk until he has to leave to pick up his three kids from school. In person, the most striking thing about the actor isn’t his impressive height, or his surfer’s tan, or even his Popsicle-blue eyes that electrically charged the Marvel universe for more than a decade. It’s his lack of slickness. There’s nothing oily or impatient or rehearsed about the man. Saturday Night Live star Cecily Strong once called Hemsworth her favorite host because nobody had expected Thor to be “the cool jock that just wants to hang out with the gay theater kids.”

His home is so full of life. He and his wife of 14 years, the Spanish actor Elsa Pataky, are parents to an 11-year-old girl and twin 9-year-old boys. The family also has an enormous fish tank, three dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, and donkeys, as well as the horses they keep at their nearby farm. What used to be an art room for the kids now has a paper with “REPTIEL” written in Magic Marker bubble letters taped to the door for the lizard, axolotl, and snake named Shoelace. Hemsworth’s daughter, India, keeps birds in her bedroom’s large, enclosed balcony, one of whom likes to sit on her shoulder out on the sofa. Also wandering around the property is a cat, which his family surprised him with. Hemsworth isn’t a cat guy, but he even less wants to be the guy who makes his kids return a creature once they’ve fallen in love.

The family moved to Byron Bay in 2015 to be close to his parents, who live just up the hill, but also to escape the head trip of Hollywood, which Hemsworth summarizes as follows: “I’m sick of my face. Why isn’t it on a billboard? I’m too famous. Why are there paparazzi here? Wait, why aren’t there any paparazzi here?” He pauses. “Well, which do you want, Chris?” He’s prone to that toxic seesawing of anxiety and reproach, and it makes him so tired. Of himself, mostly.

This may be the most surprising thing about Hemsworth: For all his hunky appeal, he’s also deeply reflective, ambivalent, and complicated. We talk for hours out on his pool deck, overlooking the beach, two of his dogs asleep at our feet. He picks at the calluses on his hands like worry beads, ruminating over his answers with care. At 40, he feels like he’s at a crossroads, unsure of how to best navigate life, and—careers being like horses—what, if anything, is in his control.

This month, Hemsworth stars in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the hotly anticipated prequel to 2015’s Oscar-winning box office smash Fury Road set in the same blighted wasteland. Alongside Anya Taylor-Joy’s titular character, Hemsworth plays Dementus, the charismatic leader of a biker horde. He disappears so completely into the role—which intentionally blunts the Marvel of him with a prosthetic Apolline nose and brown contact lenses—that his own friends didn’t recognize him in the trailer. Hemsworth’s Dementus, however full of cheeky verve, has been ruined by deprivation and loss; he is a man with ash for a soul who now worships only the god of survival. Tellingly, it is the actor’s favorite role since he starred in Ron Howard’s 2013 race car drama, Rush. “Ron took me out of that typecast space of the muscly action guy and let me play a character with complications and darkness,” he says. “I remember thinking at the time, Oh, this is going to change everything.” It took a decade, and working with Miller, to feel fed as deeply. “Yeah,” says Hemsworth, “it’s been a long wait.”

After a year at home catching his breath and nursing a back injury, Hemsworth wants off the bench. “The one side of my brain tells me, Oh, you took too much time off and now the train’s passed you by,” he says. “The more rational mind is like, You’ve turned down a lot of stuff too—big action films where there wasn’t a solid script.” But he also wants stillness. He wants work outside the action lane and to be taken seriously by directors like Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg. But he also thinks he owes the audience another Thor after what felt like a whiff with Thor: Love and Thunder. He wants to let himself take his craft more seriously. But he doesn’t want to be “an overly self-important, pretentious wanker.” And he wants it known, once and for all, that he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, nor has he quit the business.

Two years ago, as part of the National Geographic docuseries Limitless, Hemsworth underwent genetic testing that revealed he carried two copies of the APOE4 gene. The startling news—which is not a diagnosis but a marker of risk that one of my daughters happens to share—coincided with planned time off, and some headlines conflated the two incorrectly. “It really kind of pissed me off because it felt like I had been vulnerable with something personal and shared this,” he says. “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.” His face relaxes into a smile, because that’s how he was raised, in a family acutely aware of life’s fragility, so best not to take any of it too seriously. “I did read a really funny comment at the bottom of one article: ‘I hope Chris forgets he’s retiring and comes back.’”

Chris Hemsworth Changed His Life After an Ominous Health Warning

When Leonie Hemsworth’s 23-year-old son moved to Los Angeles in 2007, she gave him a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! “Pack your bags, off you go,” she told him. “If it doesn’t work out, the couch will always be here.”

Chris crawled at four and a half months, took his first steps at 10 and a half months, and insisted he could swim when he was just two and a half years old. “He scared a lot of people because he looked like he was drowning,” she said in a toast at Hemsworth’s 40th birthday party not long ago, the text of which she shared with me. “He had a weird otter kind of swim where he’d come up for air in between bouts of drowning, but he wouldn’t let anyone help him. He had to do it on his own.” Hemsworth’s superpower, though it may have looked like a curse from the shoreline, was tenacity.

When they weren’t outside catching giant lace monitor lizards or paddling out for waves, the three Hemsworth boys—older brother Luke and Hunger Games star Liam—grew up watching movies like Legends of the Fall on a loop. “There’s never been a more beautiful man onscreen,” Hemsworth says of Brad Pitt’s tortured rancher, Tristan Ludlow. He rewatched the movie with his wife when she was pregnant with the twins. “Is this not the coolest character in the world?” he said to her. “I think one of our kids needs to be named Tristan.” (Their other son, Sasha, is named after a stuntman friend.)

Hemsworth wanted to be an actor because he wanted to be like Pitt in Legends, Patrick Swayze in Point Break, or Robert De Niro in Heat. His brother Luke had found work on a TV show, and that seemed like fun. “Then it just became a complete obsession,” he says. Before coming to America, he spent three years on an Australian soap, playing a hunk. “I always felt like, Oh, I’m just being kind of put over here in the corner: ‘Yeah, just take your shirt off and go over there, and now you’re working at the gym and now you’re working at the bar.’”

He was a 25-year-old unknown when he booked Thor, one of the great gifts of his life. Leonie got a note from the first film’s costume designer, who told her that of all the actors who screen-tested for the role, only Hemsworth and his younger brother, Liam, hung up their costumes afterward. “I had to laugh,” Leonie tells me. “It wasn’t necessarily what they did at home!”

Grateful as he was for the opportunity, Hemsworth grew frustrated playing the great Asgardian defender. “Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team,” he says. “I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun. What’s my character doing? It was always about, ‘You’ve got the wig on. You’ve got the muscles. You’ve got the costume. Where’s the lighting?’ Yeah, I’m part of this big thing, but I’m probably pretty replaceable.”

His friend and costar Robert Downey Jr. won’t hear of such talk. “First off, Thor as a character was super tricky to adapt—lots of implied limitations—but he and Ken Branagh figured out how to transcend, make him somehow relatable but godlike,” he says. “Hemsworth is, in my opinion, the most complex psyche out of all us Avengers. He’s got wit and gravitas, but also such restraint, fire, and gentleness.”

When Taika Waititi came aboard to direct 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, he was as eager to tweak the Thor character as its megastar. They decided to have some fun with tone, letting Hemsworth dig into his natural comedic gifts, with the character wonderfully reduced to a god with a dad bod, wallowing and brokenhearted. Fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett, his Ragnarok costar, loved him immediately. “I first met Chris on the lot—he was driving a golf cart, his Thor locks flying—careening towards me with a huge grin of welcome,” she says. “I had heard he was generous, and boy is he generous, hilarious, and as hardworking and diligent as he is handsome, but I had no idea what a goofball he is. He is a complete goofball. He sets the tone on set—everyone is valued. Everyone is welcome. I adore and admire him deeply.”

Downey calls Hemsworth’s work in Ragnarok, Infinity War, and Endgame “a formidable hat trick.” But then came Love and Thunder, for which Hemsworth still can’t forgive himself. “I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself,” he says. “I didn’t stick the landing.”

Twenty-seven movies—eight of them Marvel blockbusters—in just over a dozen years. Hemsworth’s back was blown, his monkey brain in overdrive. He was too anxious to turn down big roles when they were offered, not wired to trust that he’d ever be offered a great drama, sweeping love story, or romantic comedy. (“Remember Hugh Grant in Notting Hill?” he asks. “I haven’t seen a movie like that in years.”) “I’d been trying to muscle and beat things into existence for so long, out of obsession and desperation to build this career, and I was just exhausted,” he says, looking out on the waves he’ll seek comfort on later, surfing being the best salve for his ping-ponging mind. “I was worried about everything,” he says. “Nothing was as enjoyable as it once was, or I had imagined it was. I was making back-to-back movies and doing the press tours, and I was married and had three young kids, and it was all happening at the same time in a very short window.” He rests his bare foot on his dog Sunny’s belly. “You’re sort of just running on fumes, and then you’re showing up to something with little in the tank and you start to pick things apart: Why am I doing this film? Why isn’t this script better? Why didn’t that director call me for that or why didn’t I get considered for this role? Why don’t I get the call-up from Scorsese or Tarantino? I had begun to take it all too serious and too personal.”

Hemsworth’s family knows the way his thinking can torture him. “His mind is a crystal, but it can also be a prison,” says Luke, who had a hilarious turn as Thor alongside Matt Damon’s Loki in a play set within Ragnarok. “He can be so focused and self-critical. He has real anxiety about making a decision. And he can spiral, there’s no doubt about that.” Luke laughs when I tell him that Hemsworth gave me his well-worn copy of Michael Alan Singer’s self-help book The Untethered Soul, and he can’t resist throwing in a playful, brotherly jab: “I dunno whether he’s ever read it or just looked at the pictures.”

Hemsworth found himself trapped in the tunnel of self. “My mum would come over for a cup of coffee and she would have to snap her fingers, and go, ‘Chris, where are ya? Come on, I’m here.’ The chatter in my head got so intense—and then the sense of guilt that every time I’d leave a dinner with parents or a friend, I’d say, ‘God, I wasn’t even there. I just spent the time bitching or complaining.’ There’s a narcissism to it. How many more years are we going to have this conversation? Like, just shut up, Chris.”

Luke is good at knocking his brother out of his head. “There are a few mottos I like to remind him of,” he says. “One is, whenever we’re at these premieres—or doing these press tours where you’re in hotels having martinis in world-famous piano bars—I look at him and say, ‘Oi, how good is this?!’ Just as a reminder that he should enjoy this more than anyone else. We grew up with working-class parents, and we all worked from a very young age, so to have that freedom and the ability to go and see all these beautiful places is extraordinary. The other one I like to remind him of is, When the bad times outweigh the good, it’s time to do something different.”

In 2015, Hemsworth saw Fury Road in the theater with his wife in London, where he was shooting an Avengers movie. He was thunderstruck. “I came out of it and called my agent,” he says. “I haven’t been able to completely immerse myself in a film as a fan for years because I’ve seen behind the curtain and the magic is gone. This is the first film in years where I felt 100 percent involved in the experience as a true fan.” He asked his agent to get him a meeting with George Miller.

Six months later, Miller met with Hemsworth in Sydney as a courtesy. He already had several actors in mind for Furiosa. “Oh God, my mind was completely somewhere else in terms of who might play Dementus,” says Miller. But they talked for hours—about psychology and philosophy and the personality disorders that make a villain not just dangerous but intriguing. “What surprised me was the depth of his insight about work, the world at large, himself, and it came effortlessly out of the conversation,” says Miller. “I had this sense that there was a way more complex, considered person than I’d ever imagined meeting.” The job was his, though they each had other movies to shoot first.

Hemsworth practically limped off Extraction 2, the Netflix juggernaut about a sad mercenary fighting very bad guys. Miller was already nervous the actor wouldn’t get off in time for the eight-week rehearsal period. Hemsworth had hoped to sneak in surgery on his back and lie about it without telling anyone but ran out of time. His trainer, his best friend since they were six, asked him how he was going to power through. “I said, ‘Look, I don’t have a choice,’” says Hemsworth. “And as soon as I got to rehearsals, everything lifted. I just got reinvigorated. Suffering without a purpose is awful. Suffering with purpose can be rejuvenating and replenishing. I’d grown so tired of myself, and now I had to lose myself in a character.”

Miller encouraged his actor to read books like Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator and to write journals as Dementus. “I had never done that before,” Hemsworth says of the process. “I had always thought I didn’t need it, rolled my eyes in the past. Too self-serious. But I think by having that attitude, I kind of missed an opportunity to do a deeper dive into character development.” For Furiosa, he worked on modulating his voice into a mid-20th-century accent, his grandfather’s generation, that Miller adored. Together, they dug into Dementus’s nasty human core. “It was really, really weird turning up on set for several months getting used to Dementus,” says Miller. “When I saw Chris many months later, my first instinct was, Wait a minute, this is not Chris Hemsworth. This is a fraud!”

Fury Road, however perfect a film, was a famously embattled production—riddled with relocations, weather delays, and a feud between Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. Miller says Furiosa was the opposite, thanks in large part to Hemsworth’s steadying hand. “Whenever there was a weather problem, he was on set,” he says. “He brought the whole cast around him.” Miller cast several former inmates, who’d joined a theater group while in prison, as members of Dementus’s horde. “It was a wonderfully eclectic group of personalities, and I became really close with my little gang,” says Hemsworth, who invited the whole lot of them to spend the weekend at his house in Byron Bay during filming.

Furiosa was such an enriching experience, it’s no wonder that Hemsworth is nervous about what’s next. He’s trying to embrace the gift of feeling untethered, as it were, but it goes against his nature. In his inbox, there’s two scripts waiting to be read—a musical and a romantic comedy. In other news, he saw Baz Luhrmann recently and asked the fellow Aussie, “Hey, when are we going to work together?” And he’s going to film a second season of Limitless for producer Darren Aronofsky and hold out hope for a dramatic collaboration. “I keep reminding him of that,” he says, laughing. “‘Hey, remember our first meeting? I said I’ll come do it if you do a film with me?’” Hemsworth says Aronofsky is developing two potential projects for him, a dark comedy and a sci-fi piece. “Chris is very, very gifted,” Aronofsky says. “He showed a lot of vulnerability on Limitless. That was being himself, but that informs that there’s a lot inside of him. He has huge amounts of range he’s just starting to share.”

And, God, Hemsworth would love to do a movie with Pitt. After two decades in the business, Hemsworth did finally meet his screen idol, at the Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood premiere’s after-party. “I was kind of hiding in the corner,” he says. “My agent came by and said, ‘Did you meet Brad yet?’ I said, ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to meet me,’ and my agent said, ‘No, he does, come and say hello!’ When Brad went to shake my hand, somehow in my eagerness I’d already gone in for a hug.” He pauses with a wincing laugh. “Which thankfully was accepted, and we had a chuckle about. We talked a lot about motorbikes, because my dad used to race.”

Women get asked all the time how they feel about turning 40 in Hollywood, so I ask Hemsworth how he feels about it. “I think for the first time in my career I’ve started thinking, Shit, how many years do I have left that I can do this? I went through a sort of list of films with my production partner yesterday, a bit of a wish list, and then I was like, ‘Well, that’s six films. That could be the next decade. That could be it. Who knows where I am at that point?’”

Recently, several Avengers gathered in the name of love at Chris Evans’s wedding in Boston. Hemsworth brought his mother as his date, whom Downey calls “a complete hoot. There’s a lot of her in him.” Hemsworth hadn’t seen Jeremy Renner since the freak snowplow accident that hit the Avengers text chain like a bullet. “He sent us all a sort of a doped out, hospital, beat-up image and said, ‘All good, guys.’ And then I didn’t hear from him for a while as he was in the thick of it.” At the wedding, the gang rallied around their risen friend. “If there’s one characteristic we’d all agree is paramount,” Downey says of their crew, “it’s resilience. To see Renner embody that literally, and in the context of what was basically a Portuguese American wedding, was mind-blowing. Fully recovered and ready to celebrate. So, yes—miracles happen.”

“There was an astounding sense of gratitude from him around just being alive,” agrees Hemsworth. He’s holding tightly onto that, especially now.

Hemsworth’s hero is his father, whom he describes as a lion of a man. His father was his date to the premiere of his first movie, Star Trek, in 2009: “I only had three or four lines. At the end, he just reached over and gave me a big kiss on the head and a cuddle, and he told me many times how proud he was of me. Certainly, in my times of doubt, I see both him and my mum, and I go, Okay, I must be on the right track.”

Craig Hemsworth spent his career as a social worker with the department of human services, specializing in cases of childhood violence and neglect. “I saw the toll that took on him,” says Hemsworth. “He’d have to present evidence of whether or not this was a safe environment for this kid to be in, and if it isn’t, well, then imagine the ripple effects for that child and those parents and that family. Whether he prevented something bad from happening in one case, there was always another one.” Hemsworth seems surprised by a bog of tears in his throat as he relates all this, and he pauses until it passes. “I hope that sums up what an incredible person he is. He is the most generous person you’ll ever meet, there for anyone.…” He clears his throat and gives himself another moment.

When Hemsworth was little, he remembers going to the neighborhood park with his father and happening upon some rowdy-looking teenagers smashing bottles on the playground. His father walked over and told them to clean up their mess. Hemsworth watched with mounting anxiety as the boys refused. “I just remember Dad very firmly saying, ‘My son got six stitches in his foot last week because he cut his foot here on a broken bottle. Don’t cross me on this one, guys. Get to work.’ And they did. They picked up the glass! And I remember knowing that’s who you have to be, but lacking the confidence in myself—trying to stand up to people and just being scared out of my mind and being really upset because my dad wouldn’t be afraid, you know? He never put that on me, ever, but having that role model was both an inspiration and intimidating, you know?”

Luke tells me a story about how he and his brother like to take their families surfing at the nearby popular Wategos Beach, because the waves there are the best for kids and beginners. But lately the brothers have noticed how selfish the more experienced surfers can be, lashing out at kids when they interrupt their precious shot at a perfect wave. The Hemsworth boys learned to surf with their dad on Phillip Island in Victoria, and on holiday in Mallacoota, where the old guys showed them true aloha spirit. “When you’d paddle out,” Luke says, “they would yell, ‘Go, Grommet, go! Off you go!’” Now there’s so many surfers here who can get really mean to kids. Chris doesn’t suffer bullies, so when he sees grown adults being dangerous or mean towards kids, he’s quite happy to have a quiet word with them. Or a loud one.”

Later Hemsworth tells me what got him so choked up while talking about his dad. After Limitless revealed his own copies of the APOE4 gene, the whole family underwent genetic testing. His father carries the gene as well, as did his grandfather, who died last year after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Craig has begun confronting early signs of the disease. “I know my dad is going through a transition of acceptance around ‘I’m not this big, strong man with all the answers who everybody looks to for guidance now,’” Hemsworth says. He shakes his head, wondering aloud on how best to honor who his father was and who he sees him becoming. “He’s much more the observer now, rather than leading the pack. It’s a reminder to me because those are exactly the qualities I need: stillness, observation, absorption, a respect for the present moment.”

Hemsworth’s parents came over to his place for dinner after he and I visited out on the deck. They talked about the future, he tells me: about how much living there is left to do, but also about the inevitable transition all families face as generations reverse roles. “We don’t want anyone we love to suffer, but what we can focus on is our attitude and perspective,” says Hemsworth. “I have a great sense of nostalgia for how life is changing. But I don’t look at any of this like, Oh no, time is running out, what a tragedy. I feel like, Well, then, get going! Be involved and stay present and don’t get caught up in all the rubbish that I may have spent a large chunk of my adult life doing. What a gift it is to be able to love so deeply and be loved. What else is there really that we’re here for?”

In Hemsworth’s family room, there’s a large black-and-white David Yarrow photograph of a lion hanging above the fireplace. The animal is poised in mid-leap, as if in ferocious embrace of whatever awaits. I ask Hemsworth if the photo is an homage at all to his lionhearted father. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says, “but it’ll make me think of him now.”

From the Archive: Hemsworth Watching

Hemsworth has never gone horseback riding out on the local beach. His wife and daughter are both competitive riders and find this lapse inexcusable. So Mom and Dad decide to let India skip the next morning of school. I’ll meet Hemsworth at the house, and India and her mother will drive separately to the beach with the horses. We set a time, but in the morning Hemsworth texts to ask if I’d mind arriving a little later than planned. “Just running a bit late with school drop.…” When I arrive, three boys I don’t recognize are roughhousing with a Thor hammer in the kitchen, while their little brother sits on the wood floor gazing happily at his favorite actor. Hemsworth introduces the crew as new friends visiting on holiday, to which the mother, a look of enormous gratitude on her face, corrects him, “Best friends.”

On the drive to the beach, Hemsworth tells me that his guests were in town on a Starlight Children’s Foundation trip: The young boy’s wish was to meet Thor. Two days ago, Hemsworth spent the afternoon with all four brothers, swimming and playing games. After the family returned to their hotel, the boy noticed that the actor’s autograph on his new Thor hammer had smeared. When their flight home got delayed, the mom asked if they could return to the house to have Hemsworth redo it. Hemsworth worried it could seem like he’d orchestrated some self-aggrandizing scene and tried to plan for me to miss it altogether.

At the beachfront, I meet his wife, Pataky, who is sparkly eyed and lovely and happy to learn that I rode horses as a child, just like India, named for Indiana Jones. “Indy’s the best rider in the family,” says Hemsworth. “Even when she falls off, she’s more angry than she is afraid: Get me back on that horse!”

When India was five years old, she desperately wanted to be a dragon, Hemsworth tells me: “She came to me one night with little tears in her eyes and said, ‘I’m just never going to be a dragon. No matter what I do.’ And I said to her, ‘No, I don’t think so, but you could go to sleep and dream of being a dragon and all the cool things you could do.’ She goes, ‘Okay, cool!’ and ran off to bed really excited.”

At bedtime, Hemsworth used to read India Oh, the Places You’ll Go! He even got a tattoo of the Dr. Seuss character on the inside of his left arm. Recently, he decided the tattoo was a little corny, and he started laser removal sessions. “India goes, ‘What’s happening? He’s rubbing off!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but maybe it’s a bit waffly to have a cartoon character on my arm?’ And she said, ‘No! We love that book, and you got the tattoo for me.’” So the tattoo stays, fuzzy and faded.

On the beach, Hemsworth opts for a Western saddle on his horse, Dolly, named after Dolly Parton. He wants to protect his back (he’ll finally end up having surgery within the month), so he rides in a kind of quarter-squat position that’s tough on the knees. Between runs, we talk about the movies that make us cry. Pataky picks The NeverEnding Story. India is stumped, but her mother says she spotted wet cheeks when they watched The Notebook in bed recently. Hemsworth says the family has a yearly date with It’s a Wonderful Life and, without fail, the scene of the sodden, grieving druggist slapping a young George Bailey always breaks his heart anew. “Don’t hurt my sore ear, Mr. Gower,” Hemsworth whimpers, quoting the film. “I know you’re upset because your son died.” Jimmy Stewart, we agree, now there was a movie star.

Pataky suggests one more ride before heading home. India and I lead the pack, the girl looking over at me with a big, open smile. We’re cantering alongside each other when she calls out that she feels like her horse wants more speed. I nod and lean down over my horse’s neck, loosening my reins and letting the animal go. And then all there is is the sound of thundering hooves and India’s ecstatic voice shouting that she thinks she spots a falcon on the sand in the distance. Could it be? It is, it is, it is a falcon!

I don’t fall off my horse and Hemsworth doesn’t have to further injure his back trying to save me, and the sun is so bright and the water so blue. An old man’s two dogs try briefly to keep pace with our horses, and up ahead a dad holds his baby under her arms while she splashes her fat little feet at the shoreline. Hemsworth is somewhere behind us, taking in the whole scene. If he’s a good father, he told me earlier, it’s because he learned from the best. So here we all are on the edge of the ocean. The truth of our lives is that nothing is promised, and everything will be taken, but in this moment we are so breathtakingly alive, an 11-year-old girl in a dragon T-shirt leading the way.

Hair by Luca Vannella. Grooming by Matteo Silvi. Tailor, Hasmik Kourinian. Set design by Colin Donahue. Produced on location by Camp Productions. Styled by Tony Irvine. Photographed exclusively for VF by Gregory Harris in LA. For details, go to VF.com/credits.