Even the God of Thunder couldn’t handle Mother Nature. Chris Hemsworth revealed to Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday, April 14, that he nearly died during a vacation in the Himalayas with his wife, Elsa Pataky.
Hemsworth’s Spanish-born model wife, 39, was invited by Spanish-speaking TV host Jesús Calleja to climb a peak several months ago, and she brought along her incredibly fit and handsome husband for the adventure. The initial portion of the ascent was fine (as seen in Hemsworth’s photos), but it rapidly deteriorated after 4,000 feet up.
“Have you ever heard of altitude depression?” the star of The Huntsman: Winter’s War, 32, asked Kimmel on Thursday. “I got that. Basically, we went to 2,000 meters and then 3,000, and then I slowly honestly started to kind of lose my mind … Just completely irrational, everything is overly sensitive to the most trivial sort of silly things.” For example, he would huff at Pataky, “‘What are we doing here?! Why are we here?'”
“And we got higher and higher and we got to 4,000 meters one night,” Hemsworth recalled on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “And it was minus 30 where we’re camping … If you have a bottle of water outside of your sleeping bag, it’s frozen by the time you wake up. Like, it has to be tucked in with you. It’s freezing. There’s dogs everywhere in the camp we’re staying in and the guards were like, ‘Don’t go near the dogs — rabies.'”
Then, one night, he had to go to the bathroom, which was located in a separate tent. He crept outside and returned back to the sleeping bag, where he started rapidly tossing and turning. His concerned wife asked what was wrong with him, and Hemsworth snapped back, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine!'” (Note to selves: maybe planning a romantic Himalayan vacation isn’t the best idea.) “And my breathing is getting worse, and I start to like [motions] like Darth Vader meets Daffy Duck.”
Pataky ignored her husband, grabbed the guards, who realized Hemsworth was in grave danger. “They take one look at me and say, ‘Get him off the mountain.’ They start injecting me with all sorts of whatever’s going to adjust my oxygen … and fly me down the mountain for eight hours.”
What he learned later was scary. “Apparently, the [lack of] oxygen in my lungs, the next day would have been [the lack of] oxygen in my brain, and then good night. We wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Watch him tell the full tale above, including snippets about dogs and more.
