Chris Hemsworth To Take Break From Acting After Learning Of Health Risk
Chris Hemsworth—who is so fucking hot, it’s almost unreal—recently learned that he’s at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Via Vanity Fair:
While working on National Geographic’s Limitless, his new docuseries about pushing back on the natural decline that comes with time and aging, the star of Thor and Extraction underwent a battery of genetic tests to see what, if anything, the future might have waiting for him, etched into his very DNA. What he discovered, he says in the show, was “my biggest fear.”
His makeup includes two copies of the gene APOE4, one from his mother, the other from his father, which studies have linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. One in four people carry a single copy of the gene, but only 2 to 3% of the population have both, according to a 2021 study by the National Institutes of Health.
In episode five of Limitless, the 39-year-old actor confronts what this means for him and his future. It’s not a hard diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, he emphasized in a new interview with Vanity Fair, but it is cause for concern, the double occurrence of the gene placing him in a category of much higher risk for being impacted by the condition.
Hemsworth explains in the full interview that he’s not retiring, but he will be more selective about taking future jobs as he spends more time with family.
