NEW YORK
Sam Worthington would rather not be recognized.
There was a time, at the dawn of the 2010s, when the actor’s chiseled mug was everywhere. He was the conscientious cyborg at the center of “Terminator Salvation.” The Medusa-slaying demigod in “Clash of the Titans.” A human jarhead turned alien freedom fighter in the industry-jolting epic “Avatar.”
As the top-billed star of two of three highest-grossing movies of all time — 2009’s “Avatar” and its 2022 sequel, “The Way of Water” — Worthington still boasts A-list bona fides. But over the past decade, he has sneaked into stealthy anonymity. Thunderous blockbusters have been swapped out for quieter genre fare. His silver-screen exploits are now complemented by work on television and the stage.
And when the 49-year-old Australian voyages back to Pandora — as he does in “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the third installment heating up theaters Friday — his character’s permanent alien transformation means Worthington’s face is forever disguised by pixels and the performance-capture technology that dictates them.
“He is the leading man in one of the biggest franchises of all time, yet he also exists as someone comparatively unknown to many people,” says director David Mackenzie, Worthington’s frequent collaborator. “They just see him with his digital blue makeup on.”
That suits Worthington just fine. He arrives for our mid-November sit-down at a Lower East Side hotel lounge with his hoodie pulled over a Yankees cap, and stays incognito throughout our conversation. At times, he’s careful and cagey. Ask a question he hasn’t pondered? He’ll respond that he hasn’t given it much thought and move on. Ask a question that makes his creative gears turn? He’ll flash a grin that looks a whole lot like Jake Sully’s toothy snarl — sans fangs — before spinning an insightful and vivid yarn.
“Really social environments make him really uncomfortable,” says Zoe Saldaña, who plays Jake’s fierce, arrow-flinging partner in the Avatar films. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to be there — it’s just that he likes to feel safe. When he feels safe, then the extroverted Sam comes out.”
Worthington makes for an unconventional star at the heart of an unconventional phenomenon — one that, despite being an original concept in the IP era, has already earned $5.3 billion at the global box office, racked up 13 Oscar nominations and spawned an entire land at Disney World.
When we reconnect with the Sully clan in “Fire and Ash,” Jake is still bearing the scars from “The Way of Water” following a traumatic battle between Pandora’s native Na’vi and the resource-harvesting interlopers from Earth. The evils of unchecked colonialism, capitalist greed and inhumane poaching again loom large in “Fire and Ash.” An airborne ambush, a fiery jailbreak, a water-soaked siege — writer-director James Cameron surrounds Jake with more transporting spectacle and pulsating action.
Conveying multitudes through a furrowed brow, downcast eyes and a quivering lip, Jake — like Worthington — can be a figure of few words. It turns out the character is as reluctant a leader as the actor is a public figure. And who better to underscore the immersion than Hollywood’s invisible superstar?
“I always like anonymity,” Worthington says. “Having a blue avatar face, it may not get you nearly as recognized — but I’m not in it for that.”
Worthington understands that selling a movie in the press is a part of the process. But a man whose image has been projected onto the world’s largest Imax screens also doesn’t like having his picture taken. When the topic swerves inward, he instinctively squirms.
“I’m quite an introverted guy,” says Worthington, chomping at a peppermint he plucked from a bowl of leftover Halloween candy. “When you do interviews, it seems to be about you, but I’m still learning who that is.”
Here’s one thing we know: Worthington is now a New Yorker. Having previously led a more nomadic lifestyle, he relocated here full time with his wife and three sons in the coronavirus lockdown’s aftermath.
The in-the-heart-of-everything setting is starkly different from his upbringing in the suburbs of Perth, a remote metropolis on Australia’s southwestern coast. Worthington never dreamed of acting as a child but devoured movies all the same, thanks to his father’s penchant for VHS piracy. From crowd-pleasers such as “E.T.” and “Back to the Future” to deep cuts like “Man Bites Dog” and “Freaks,” Ronald Worthington raised his son on an electric diet of cinematic staples.
“My dad literally just would watch anything and record it, and think he was Blockbuster because he had all the pirated copies on the shelves,” Worthington says. “To this day, he says, ‘When I die, you can have all of them,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s a f—ing landfill, now! You know you can download half this s—?’ He’s got the DVD, the LaserDisc, the VHS — he’s got them all for the same movie.”
Worthington was working as a bricklayer when, at age 19, he auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney on a whim — accompanying his girlfriend in solidarity — and made the cut. (She didn’t, and they broke up.) By his mid-20s, he was working steadily in Australian film and television.
“The roles I was given were everyman roles — the conduit for the audience,” Worthington says. “Some people I know came out and put on the funny hat and the wig and the limp, and created this weird character. Whereas I kind of knew early on in my career that you can be what Cary Grant was for Hitchcock: the way in.”
Looking back, Worthington says he was “faking it right up until ‘Avatar.’” He won’t claim he was an actor of extraordinary range. Yet his outsider essence did make him right for Jake, the paraplegic audience surrogate who, in the original “Avatar,” embarks on a fish-out-of-water journey to the faraway moon Pandora as a genetic match for his late twin’s 9-foot-tall Na’vi avatar.
“Much of Sam’s power as a leading man comes from the pain and vulnerability that leak around the edges of his stoic armor,” Cameron, the boundary-shattering filmmaker behind “Titanic” and “The Terminator,” writes in an email. “He tackles everything full on, and so do I, so there was a recognition. He plunged into the role and brought his all to the character of Jake, both physically and emotionally.”
From there, Worthington’s surge was seismic: “Terminator Salvation,” “Avatar” and “Clash of the Titans” hit theaters between May 2009 and April 2010. Worthington leaped from unknown to ubiquitous. Although his raw talent and rugged presence made him an alluring lead, Worthington scrambled to find his footing while lunging from gig to gig. Beyond “Avatar,” the films’ reviews weren’t particularly kind.
“I did those blockbusters because they were offered,” says Worthington, who also headlined the sequel “Wrath of the Titans” in 2012. “There was no real rhyme, no real plan involved. It was like, ‘Well, I’ve got these opportunities to now go and learn on all these different film sets, to try to discover what I want to say and who I would like to work with.’ The problem with that is all of your f— ups and all of your mistakes are going to be on the screen.”
Worthington has previously opened up on his struggles with fame and alcohol in those years, and the shift to sobriety that saved him. He also credits his spirituality, amplified by his turn as a grieving father in the 2017 faith-based drama “The Shack,” with centering his soul. “At that time, I had a lot of things to forgive in myself but didn’t know how to do it,” Worthington says. “I worked my way through it using that film.”
Over the past decade, Worthington’s black-and-white heroes have ceded to colorful supporting turns. A no-nonsense U.S. Army captain in 2016’s “Hacksaw Ridge.” An idealistic Union soldier in Kevin Costner’s Horizon films. A cocky task force chief in this year’s acclaimed whistleblower thriller “Relay.”
While Worthington has seen a few projects struggle to enchant audiences or wow critics, he’s relished the chance to hone his craft out of the most blazing spotlights.
“He really is a creative seeker,” says Riz Ahmed, Worthington’s “Relay” co-star. “He is full of curiosity. He’s fascinated with the creative journey. A lot of what we talked about on set were quite deep conversations about process and his experience working with people like Anthony Hopkins [in 2015’s ‘Kidnapping Mr. Heineken’] and Harvey Keitel [in 2021’s ‘Lansky’], and how those experiences have kind of opened his eyes.”
Worthington’s most illuminating work arrived in 2022, when he portrayed Ron Lafferty — a fundamentalist Mormon convicted, along with his brother, of murdering his sister-in-law and infant niece in 1984 Utah — in the fact-based limited series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” Playing Ron as a charismatic family man harboring deep-seated savagery, Worthington delivered a tortured performance that showcased his acting evolution.
Nowhere was that better illustrated than in the show’s fifth episode. As the increasingly unhinged Ron strikes his wife, Worthington frightens through sheer ferocity. When the character walks out the door and processes his horrifying actions, anger, shame and guilt fuse in a wrenching shift of Worthington’s expression.
“There’s a wildness to Sam that is kind of thrilling,” says Mackenzie, who directed Worthington in “Under the Banner of Heaven,” “Relay” and the upcoming heist flick “Fuze.” “He is deceptively versatile in that you think what you’re getting initially is his rational approach to the character and the scene, and then what you get is these delicious, unpredictable things that take you into a new place.”
Worthington did it all between myriad visits to Pandora. Question him about the filming schedule for the Avatar sequels, which launched production in 2017 and were largely shot in New Zealand, and he will laugh, shake his head and demur.
“It’s a different film, man,” Worthington says. “You’re like a doctor on call. Jim calls you in when he can. So you can go and do another job, and he encourages you to do other jobs. But when those jobs are finished, you’ll get a call saying: ‘Hey man, can you come in? I’ve got another idea.’”
Art has imitated life since Worthington started work on “Avatar” nearly two decades ago. Just as Worthington became a father, Jake became a patriarch. Not that Worthington’s kids would know — they still haven’t made it past the first movie’s military-heavy opening. “I think it was just too much for them,” he says. “My oldest said, ‘I felt sorry for the guy in the wheelchair,’ and I said: ‘It’s me! I can walk! It’s all good.’”
Worthington concedes that his fatherly experience must seep on-screen but says he avoids consciously drawing on his family. Still, his collaborators see a protective loyalty in his performance.
“If he identifies you as one of his people, he’s going to have your back no matter what,” Saldaña says. “I’ve always felt that about Sam. To see him as a father — either as Sam or as Jake — it’s no different.”
Jake is still suppressing his grief and questioning his faith following his oldest son’s death as “Fire and Ash” picks up shortly after “The Way of Water.” When Oona Chaplin arrived to shoot the third film on the Volume — the immersive set that uses screens to project Pandora’s glowtastic environments — Worthington gave the franchise newcomer a crash course in performance capture.
Lesson No. 1: Nothing is more freeing than realizing that the head rig camera will immortalize all of your performance, as if every take is a close-up.
“He goes very, very deep, and he considers a lot of different options in every scene,” says Chaplin, who plays the ruthless head of a volcanic Na’vi tribe. “I would come in and spy on the more experienced actors for weeks to try and understand how it all worked in the Volume, and you saw him traveling inwards into these very complex places and always come up with gold.”
“Interestingly,” Cameron adds, “he thinks of his work on the Avatar films as some of the most intimate work, since performance capture doesn’t feel like working on a blockbuster. No massive sets and thousands of extras. Just a handful of committed actors working in a small space, in search of truth.”
Worthington has become such a champion for performance capture that he joined the 2018 science fiction adventure “The Titan” merely to test the alternative and confirm the caveats of prosthetic makeup. “I was a soldier who turned blue and went to another planet,” Worthington quips. “I remember talking to Jim, and he said, ‘That’s a bit derivative.’ And he was right.”
Sure enough, Worthington found prostheses to be dispiritingly restrictive. “You’re trying to push,” he says, “through this latex mask.” Shortly after our conversation concludes, an unprompted email from Worthington arrives to elaborate. Performance capture, he emphasizes, does not use generative artificial intelligence. Worthington adds that it’s not a “gimmick” and that it won’t replace actors.
“It doesn’t get the recognition because I think people think it ‘hides’ the acting,” he writes. “I believe it ‘reveals’ the spirit of the actor more. The acting in Avatar is more primal and vital and real because of it. And should be recognized as such.”
Worthington is scheduled to shoot a pair of movies in 2026 — working with directors Midi Z and Alejandro Monteverde — before starring in “Doubt: A Parable” next summer at Sydney Theatre Company, where he made his professional stage debut in a 2021 production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate.”
He also is awaiting the call from Cameron about Avatar’s future. Although the filmmaker has written the fourth and fifth movies, and already shot a few scenes, Cameron has emphasized that “Fire and Ash” must be another historic moneymaker to justify continuing the saga. But knowing where the next films go, Worthington is as ready as ever to slip into Jake’s digital skin and be the Cary Grant to Cameron’s Hitchcock once more.
“It’s a beautiful connective tissue that he’s come up with,” Worthington says. “I’ve always said that I’m Jim’s soldier. He’s allowed me to inhabit Jake, and then we worked on him together — and created a conduit.”
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