Liam Hemsworth

In The Hunger Games (2012), Gale Hawthorne hunts in the woods above District 12 with Katniss Everdeen, and that is nearly all the film asks of him. Liam Hemsworth's job is to look at Jennifer Lawrence and mean it, and he does. We said at the time that he was given a look of longing and little else, and that is still fair. He holds his place in the frame without doing much in it, which is a skill, though not the kind that gets a film talked about.

The career has been built on that stillness. He began with guest parts on Australian television in 2007, on Home and Away and McLeod's Daughters, then a recurring role on Neighbours, and moved to the United States in 2009. Knowing (2009) and The Last Song (2010), opposite Miley Cyrus, followed, and then Gale, whom he played across four films to 2015, three of them directed by Francis Lawrence. Since then he has been the tall man in things that need one: The Expendables 2 (2012), Independence Day: Resurgence (2016), the romantic comedy Isn't It Romantic (2019), with The Dressmaker (2015) the drama among them. In 2025 he took over Geralt of Rivia in the television series The Witcher from its fourth season, replacing Henry Cavill.

What he is asked for, over and over, is stature and loyalty. His characters brood, keep faith with someone, and would plainly carry them out of a burning building, and he is often stood at one corner of a love triangle whose other corners are better lit. Critics of the first Hunger Games found his Gale the least layered of the central cast, and the film gave him little chance to argue otherwise; the sequels, which we have not reviewed, widened the part as the rebellion took over the story. Watching the woods scene again, we were struck by how little the film needed from him and how little he seemed to mind. He is there so that Katniss has someone to leave, and he stands like a man who knows whose film it is. Good manners in a supporting actor; it did not make us wonder what he was thinking.

Geralt is a different proposition: a lead, and one already fixed in viewers' minds as someone else. Hemsworth has said he wanted the part "to be truthful to me and feel like my version of the character", which is what any actor would say and tells us nothing about how. The physical commitment, by most accounts, is there. If the series lets him be more than the shape of a hero, this may be the role that shows what all that stillness has been for. If not, he will have spent another few years standing solidly at the edge of someone else's story.