James Hunt's son hits out at how Chris Hemsworth played his dad in Rush
James Hunt's son Freddie is not happy with how Chris Hemsworth portrayed the Formula One legend, claiming
he played him like a 't**t.'
There are many great films about sport from the extremely true stories of Dodgeball and Happy Gilmore, to the slightly more fictional tales of Rush and Senna...
Okay so that might be the other way around but not completely in the mind of Freddie Hunt, who clearly isn't happy with how Rush played out.
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It tells the story of the legendary British driver's rivalry with Niki Lauda and their famous battle in the 1976 drivers' world championship, that ended in victory for Hunt.
It's a much acclaimed film but the younger Hunt as ripped into the acting of Australian Hemsworth and criticised for not speaking to the family, as you can hear in the video below.
"Chris Hemsworth’s performance, now I don’t know if I should be upset with Chris or Ron Howard, because he basically played dad like a t**t," he told the Pitstop podcast, "And I don’t know if that’s due to his poor acting or if he was directed to play that way.
"Daniel Bruhl, who played Niki Lauda, did an absolute masterpiece. He actually asked Niki if he could spend some time with him so he could learn his mannerisms and really get to know him.
"What did Hemsworth do in contrast? F**k all. He didn’t contact the family once.
"And when I asked Ron Howard: ‘why did you change so many things?’, the director, he said ‘Ahh the truth was too awesome man. No one would believe it.’ I nearly slapped him.
"The movie was great, you know people like it. But it could have been, if they just stuck to the truth it would have been so much better."
Hunt's last race was just three years after he won the world championship and only won three more races, all in the following year.
He sadly passed away from a heart attack in 1993 aged just 45-years-old, and had been commentating on the sport for BBC up until his death. Freddie was only six years old when his father passed away
Unlike Bruhl, Hemsworth obviously couldn't spend time with the man he was portraying on the silver screen and in his defence Lauder certainly enjoyed the film.
"This was Hollywood! The movie altogether is really good," the Austrian said about the film not being completely truthful before his own death in 2019.
"Don't forget that it has to be for young people today who don't know what happened. It's based on a true story, modified for today's world where different characters fight each other, and some people like one and some people like the other."
Suggesting he though Hunt would have liked the film the three time world champion added: "I wish that James would be here to see the whole thing. That would be the ideal situation, if we both would be able to laugh about it. This is the sad thing about it.
"He is very good; he's outstanding," the former Ferrari driver added on Bruhl's performance, "He [nailed] my Austrian/English accent, which is even harder. And Chris Hemsworth talks like James. I think they are both very good."
Topics: Formula 1
Ryan Sidle