14 DAY TRIAL // Some months ago, few had heard of the name Sam Worthington and most of them were “Terminator” fans who’d seen the latest installment in theaters, last summer’s box office disappointment “Terminator: Salvation.” Yet Worthington, this always rugged and seemingly out of place Aussie with a mouth so foul it could make a trucker blush in certain circumstances, has been around for many years – and it’s precisely this long journey to stardom that the latest feature in Details magazine explores.
Worthington is now riding the wave, as they say: he’s got several projects under his belt, awaiting a release date, and even more in the pipeline. In more ways than one, he owes all this to “Avatar” and, most importantly, to director James Cameron for casting him in the role of Jake Sully, a part for which Sam bribed Cameron with his yet-to-come first-born, as he joked once. Being now the biggest movie star on the planet, as Details refers to him, only makes the memory of 4 years ago seem more foggy – and the comparison can’t but make Worthington smile.
He didn’t grow up dreaming to become an actor and he’s not going to pretend he did just because it would look good on paper. “I’m not a great fan of people who say they put a sheet up in the backyard when they were 7 and entertained all the neighbors. When I was 7, I thought I was a [expletive] fire truck,” Sam says, choosing to drop all pretense and just be who he is. After all, he spent most of his early years in showbiz trying to be someone else: accepting movie parts because “his co-star was hot,” spending money on furniture and things to show off to his friends as validation for his career in film, and ultimately doing movies just to be able to say he had a job.
Right after turning 30, one morning, Worthington looked in the mirror and hated what he saw there – not the face, but everything it stood for, including all of the above. “So he sold the mirror, which solved the immediate issue. And with it, he sold everything else, solving – or at least scrapping the evidence of – the larger, more existential issue. Stuck a price tag on everything he owned, invited all his friends over, hosted an auction with a bona fide gavel that he auctioned off as well. ‘My mates came around, saying, How much for the kettle?’ he recalls. ‘I said Five bucks. Starting at five. Do I hear six? Six? Sold, for five bucks!’ The microwave went. The TV went. The couch went. The knives and forks went. Everything went, except for Worthington’s books, which he assumed none of his buddies wanted – Lord of the Flies, anyone? – and which, as a literary sentimentalist, he didn’t mind keeping anyway,” Details writes of Worthington’s decision to “reboot” his life.
That was back in 2006. “It’s four years later, and Sam Worthington has just spied himself in another kind of mirror. There he is, on the screen of a muted TV tuned to Entertainment Tonight that’s in the green room at L.A.'s Smashbox Studios, walking the red carpet at the Golden Globe Awards the night before: Sam Worthington, a grinning avatar in a black suit with narrow black tie, drifting into the peripheral vision of the corporeal, here-and-now Sam Worthington. He stops, midsentence, and squints up at the screen. ‘Well, that’s weird,’ he murmurs, as if struck, for the first time, by his own ubiquity. He watches himself for a moment, not vainly but curiously, the way a dog processes an unfamiliar smell, and looks away before the TV is done showing him. He’d just been talking about the blur of the previous night – about being starstruck by meeting Mike Tyson, hobnobbing with the ‘big boys’ – which may account for some of the weirdness of it, but there’s another weirdness at play as well: the four-year journey to this point, from living in the back of a Camry in Australia to being – for this white-hot moment anyway – the biggest movie star on the planet,” the mag further says.
It’s been an incredible ride for Sam Worthington and, he and the fans can only hope, it won’t end anytime soon. Given his dedication, talent and his willingness to give it his best, chances are this is one Aussie who won’t be going anywhere, at least not for a long while.
