Chris Hemsworth finally comes out and admits that Cannes' standing ovation thing is "awkward"
“It felt like 30. You just clap your hands after a [while], you’re also clapping yourself, which is even worse. Do I stop?”
Today, in “Finally, somebody fucking said it” news: Chris Hemsworth has come out and admitted that getting seven minutes of a standing ovation in the aftermath of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival this year was “awkward,” and only got moreso as the applause continued.
Which is as good a time as any, it feels like, to acknowledge that the Cannes clapping thing is weird, and has only gotten weirder as the internet has made it easier to fixate on facts like “This movie got a 10-minute standing ovation; ooh, this one got 10.5!” As an immediate way to gauge audience reactions to new films, it’s maybe mildly useful—although plenty of great films have passed through the festival’s theaters with minimal claps, and even boos—but it’s also just genuinely weird to think about a whole theater of people standing in place and clapping, just so their claps can be counted.
Hemsworth pretty much agrees, it seems, telling The One Show that the waves of applause started awkward, and only got worse from there. “I’ve heard six minutes, six-and-a-half, seven, someone said eight, there’s all different reports,” Hemsworth said of Furiosa’s reception after debuting yesterday. “It felt like 30. You just clap your hands after a [while], you’re also clapping yourself, which is even worse. Do I stop?”
Hemsworth’s co-star in the film, Anya Taylor-Joy, was a bit more accepting of the strangeness, noting that, “It goes in waves. To be fair, they can boo. So I’m really glad it was clapping and not booing.” For those keeping track, meanwhile—because we are also human beings, and numbers draw our eyes like mindless magpies—Furiosa’s ovation reportedly landed somewhere in the 6-8 minute range, roughly tying with Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Andrea Arnold’s Bird. The longest ovation in the festival’s history remains the 22 minutes of clapping that followed the debut of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan Labyrinth, which is, don’t get us wrong, a great movie, but, c’mon: Whole thing must have started to feel silly around minute 17, right?