Chris Hemsworth was a big part of Taika Waititi landing the director's gig on Thor

Chris Hemsworth has been dying to work with Taika ever since he saw Boy. Photo / Instagram

It turns out Chris Hemsworth was instrumental in landing Thor: Ragnarok's Kiwi director, Taika Waititi.

The director seemed at first to be a bit of an outside choice, having specialised before in smaller, quirkier movies such as Boy, vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows and funny family film Hunt for the Wilderpeople

But the Aussie actor, who is on the Gold Coast filming the Marvel movie, reveals he's been a fan of the director's work for a long time.

"When I saw Boy I wanted to meet him and then sought him out. When I met him I said 'I want to work with you' and then when this opportunity came up it was just like 'yes'. This is exactly what I felt Thor the character needed and what the world needed," he said.

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Thanks a lot dude. @chrishemsworth

A post shared by Taika Waititi (@taikawaititi) on Jul 7, 2016 at 2:16am PDT

"His name came up among a handful of people and he was certainly the one I pointed to," he said.

"But he got himself the job through true talent. But he had my vote."

Hemsworth says Thor has been gradually getting funnier over his past few onscreen outings.

A bit of Taika-styled humour has been a long time coming for Thor, Hemsworth says.

"It's been sort of creeping to the surface over the years and at times he's become too earnest. But especially in the last Avengers I thought 'I want more of that fun. I want more of that sort of humour'. There's plenty of it in this film, which is refreshing," he said.

"We have the script, which is great but then Taika will say 'Let's just try the wacky version now and send it in this direction' and 90 per cent of it might be unusable.

"But hopefully there's 10 per cent in there that can be used."