Is Chris Hemsworth the New Marilyn Monroe?
Chris Hemsworth (left) as ditzy receptionist Kevin in ‘Ghostbusters,’ a character that owes a debt to Marilyn Monroe (right) in movies like ‘Monkey Business’ (Photo: Hemsworth, Columbia Pictures; Monroe, Twentieth Century Fox)
Meet America’s favorite new ditzy blonde: Chris Hemsworth! In Ghostbusters, the Australian actor pivots his leading-man looks into a savvy comic turn as the ghost-busting ladies’ incompetent receptionist, Kevin. Over Ghostbusters’ opening weekend, Hemsworth’s performance drew comparisons to another smart actor who perfected the art of playing dumb: Marilyn Monroe.
On Friday, novelist Shannon Hale tweeted, “Chris Hemsworth in Ghostbusters was a gender-swapped Marilyn Monroe. And he’s brilliant at comedy.” Film blogger Marya E. Gates went more granular with the comparison on Sunday, tweeting, “I wondered if @ChrisHemsworth watched MONKEY BUSINESS to prepare for this role.” A few critics and film sites also picked up on similarities between Hemsworth and Monroe’s characters, including Vanity Fair, which ran a blog post grading Kevin against cinema’s best-loved dumb blondes.
Related: Chris Hemsworth’s Funniest Pre-’Ghostbusters’ Moments
The Marilyn Monroe analogy makes a lot of sense. Hemsworth’s role in Ghostbusters is a throwback to a once-popular archetype: the dim-bulb secretary hired for her looks by a lustful (male) boss. Monroe played such a role in Monkey Business, the 1952 screwball comedy about a chemist (Cary Grant) who invents an elixir of youth. As the office bombshell, Monroe steals every scene — including the one below, where she tells Grant that she always gets to the office before nine because “Mr. Oxley’s been complaining about my punctuation.”
That’s the same brand of humor that defines Kevin in Ghostbusters, an eager-to-please looker who can’t properly answer a phone to save his life. When asked if he remembered the sugar in his boss’s coffee, he tastes it to make sure. (And then spits it out, suddenly remembering that he hates coffee.) When told not to listen to a conversation, he covers his eyes. Tasked with designing a Ghostbusters logo, he pastes a clip-art hot dog above a house, because “the hot dog in the air implies a ghost is holding it.”
Related: Chris Hemsworth to Return as Kirk’s Father in Fourth ‘Star Trek’ Film
Kevin’s use of his eyeglasses as a comic prop (they’re empty frames because the lenses “kept getting dirty”) inspired Vanity Fair to recall another Monroe performance, as near-sighted husband-seeker Pola Debevoise in How to Marry a Millionaire. In the scene below, she explains why she’s hesitant to wear her specs in public, citing (incorrectly) the once-popular adage that “men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
It takes a pretty smart comedian to pull off these punchlines; Monroe, like fellow “dumb blondes” Judy Holliday and Jayne Mansfield, was famously intelligent. Hemsworth rises to that challenge in Ghostbusters, fully committing to Kevin’s affable stupidity. Like Monroe, he has a body that makes jaws drop — but his ability to wring laughs from every line is even more impressive.
Watch a clip from documentary ‘Marilyn Monroe: In the Movies’:
