Sam Worthington is impossible to predict. In December, the Aussie actor starred in Avatar: Fire and Ash, a blockbuster sequel that grossed nearly $1.5bn, and is currently the 16th biggest movie of all time. Worthington, reprising the role of interstellar marine-turned-insurgent Jake Sully, was front and centre. Now, the star reappears in the scrappy heist thriller Fuze, in a fairly minor, almost dialogue-free part. In the original script, he tells me, the character was basically written as “Henchman Two”. To go immediately from one to the other is, I suggest, a little bizarre. “It’s always been bizarre,” he replies. “I’ve never had a plan in that regard. I think people have looked at my career and gone, ‘What the f*** is he doing?’”
He smiles at me, through the lens of his kid’s iPad. Worthington, 49, is currently in snowy Colorado with his family, his scraggly beard giving him a rather wilderness-appropriate look. “I look a bit like I’m in The Revenant,” he jokes. He speaks fast, in an idiolect peppered with metaphors and the occasional swear word. There’s a slight air of restlessness to him. “I think it’s well known I find interviews and all those things kind of excruciating,” he admits. “I can get very anxious.”
On screen, more often than not, Worthington is a picture of sturdy calm; that’s initially the case in Fuze, where he plays one of a gang of robbers, headed by Theo James, who use the distraction of a large, unearthed Second World War bomb near London’s Edgware Road as cover while they stage a bank job. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a military major tasked with defusing the bomb. It’s tense, twisty, and exactly the kind of film that just never gets made any more.
Worthington came to the project in an effort to re-team with director David MacKenzie, whom he had previously worked with on the 2024 thriller Relay, and the 2022 miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven. Initially, no one would even give him the script to read. “They said, ‘It’s all cast – there’s nothing,’” Worthington recalls. “‘You can’t work with him again.’” The part they eventually settled on was, he says, “written like an extra”.
“But,” he adds, “they’re the roles I sometimes love. Because David trusts me enough to let me come up with something. And he knows that I know the dynamics of filmmaking enough that I can balance the other actors.” Eventually, the character morphed into something of an antagonist for James’s scheming thief, another “ticking bomb” to deal with while Taylor-Johnson was handling the literal one.
In effect, this meant doing a lot with a little: absent any explicit backstory, Worthington was left to construct his character through action and very scant dialogue. “I don’t like words, man,” says Worthington, in that brisk patter of his. “It’s motion pictures, not motion words! That’s what I’ve always thought.”
He shrugs. “If we’re talking about a [David] Mamet or [an Aaron] Sorkin, their writing is unbelievable. But most times, I like scripts where the words are the least important thing. It’s human behaviour that excites me. And if you can do that economically, or with a look, that’s the challenge.”
For Worthington, every new role, he says, is first and foremost an act of self-discovery. “Every job is me trying to learn something,” he says. “Maybe over the last 20-odd years, it’s been to my detriment, but I’ve learned more as an actor than I ever could if I was trying to search for a career. You learn more from s*** jobs sometimes than ones that are revered. I’ve always looked at that as my journey.”
This is not the sort of rhetoric you might expect from the man who fronted the most commercially successful film ever made. The shadow of Avatar, James Cameron’s technically pioneering 2009 space epic, would have swallowed some actors’ careers whole. When he was cast in it, Worthington was living out of his car. He wasn’t a complete unknown – he’d been working for the better part of a decade in his native Australia (where he had lived since he was six months old, after his British parents moved there from Surrey). But it was still a huge adjustment, zero to 90 without so much as a seatbelt.
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While much of the film would see him transformed, with CGI, into a towering blue-skinned alien replica, the first Avatar also featured plenty of Worthington’s real human face – placing him squarely in the spotlight. “Dude, I was a 29-year-old dude from Australia,” he says. “If you told me I was going to be in the biggest movie of all time, I would have just laughed. It doesn’t make much sense.” When it comes to Avatar’s phenomenal success, he still doesn’t know what to make of it. “I don’t play it down, because it means so much to me and it’s given me my life. But at the same time – what? I’m gonna walk around wearing a red chinchilla and driving a limo?
“Every time I try to overthink it or if I just bring it up to my wife, she just looks at me like I’m crazy and goes, ‘Why are you saying this?’ Like, I don’t care, my kids don’t care what I did or how big the movie is. It doesn’t work that way.”
At the time, the sudden fame was destabilising: Worthington has spoken about his worsening alcoholism in the years immediately post-Avatar. With the support of his wife, Australian model and TV personality Lara Worthington (née Bingle), and with a renewed relationship to his own Christian faith, he has been sober since 2014. The pair have three children together, Rocket, Racer and River.
The 2010s were a period of professional adjustment, too. Worthington dabbled in more big-budget endeavours (2010’s Clash of the Titans was a smash hit; its 2012 sequel less so). “In my thirties, it was a lot of blockbusters and action movies, and people assumed that that’s what I wanted to do,” he says. Then, when he reached his forties, he started being inundated with “dad roles”.
Of course, Worthington’s finest work is very much a “dad role”. Cameron’s two Avatar sequels, The Way of Water (2022) and last year’s Fire and Ash, were a leap forward for the franchise artistically, improving on the original in most every way. The action was bigger, the effects more spectacular, but – crucially – it also carried a far greater emotional potency. Jake Sully, no longer the ideologically conflicted marine, was now a patriarch, with the weight of a society on his shoulders.
Cameron talked through his plans for the Avatar sequels with his cast – “and the complexities and nuances come out of those discussions,” says Worthington. “By that time, me and [co-star Zoe Saldana] had become parents, so he knew he could push us down those paths. You’re not using your family, but you definitely have different instincts than you had when you were single and 29.” He has, he adds, “known Jim a long time. I know what he wants and I’m the soldier who will give it to him.”
For someone who has always been less comfortable with the “biz” side of showbiz, Worthington says the Avatar cast were “protected” by Cameron and producer Jon Landau. “We’re unlike Marvel movies, in the sense of… it feels like an independent movie when we make it,” he says. “We don’t have outside pressures, or expectations from the press, or the studio, or the community. It doesn’t affect what we do. And that’s why we can take more risks.
“It’s not like we have to get scenes completed by today or the studio is going to be upset. We just play and create. People don’t understand that,” he continues. In the same vein, he disputes Cameron’s reputation for being, to put it politely, something of a perfectionist. “They think it’s this big solid machine where Jim is the didactic director. And he’s not. He’s a painter.”
Worthington has worked with other auteur filmmakers, notably Mel Gibson in the Oscar-nominated war drama Hacksaw Ridge, and, more recently, Kevin Costner in his passion-project western Horizon (split over four films, two of which remain hypothetical). “When an actor is your director, they impart knowledge without actually knowing they’re imparting it,” says Worthington. “Kevin, he’s a very particular director, and he’s very traditional. So that was a challenge for me, considering I want it to be about freedom and creativity. He had lived with that story for 10 years, and was very specific about what he wanted.”
Increasingly, he is drawn to leftfield material. Among his forthcoming films is a faith-based movie titled Zero AD. “I just think the Bible has some great stories, man, and this is one of them,” he says. The story in question is the Slaughter of the Innocents, in which King Herod, afraid of losing his throne to a child, goes out and massacres thousands of babies. “That’s a pretty incredible story,” he says. “I think you can only get away with that by saying it’s a faith-based film. Imagine if that was the pitch to Paramount or Warner Bros as a normal movie. They’d look at you like you’re insane.”
Also coming up is The Exiles, already shot in Taiwan. Half the film is in Taiwanese; Worthington plays a gangster trying to break into the Taipei crime scene. “If the movie works, who knows what that’s going to open up?” he asks. “But it was a hell of an experience, probably one of the best I’ve ever had. Even though I’ve got no idea what they said half the time. The director was just crazy enough to embrace me.”
Worthington smiles. When he talks about not having a plan, he really seems to mean it.
“I’m now about to turn 50,” he says. “That’s a long career. And what’s happened is I’m now starting to understand what the f*** I’m doing, in the sense of what kind of actor I am, and where I can fit into the puzzle.” Whether that’s Avatar 4, or Henchman Number Three, Worthington is all for it.
‘Fuze’ is in UK cinemas from 3 April
