“When I started acting, I wanted to do action movies, but those roles were always for men”
Elsa Pataky’s voice is crackling and muffled down the phone. The Spanish native has driven her car to an area near her home in Byron Bay, where she’s able to get a tiny shred of phone reception for our interview. It’s no easy feat thanks to the power outages and general service disruption caused by the devastating floods and punishing rainfall around the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales earlier this year. “Hopefully it will stop soon, because I don’t think people can take much more,” says the model and actor, who moved to the area in 2014 with her husband, action star Chris Hemsworth, daughter India, now 10, and twin boys Sasha and Tristan, now eight. At one point, Pataky and her children were flooded in on their own with no phone reception at all. “Fingers crossed it will not be much more,” she shouts over the sound of heavy rain.
