Sam Worthington: Greatest Actor of Our Time?

Thanks to roles in "Terminator Salvation" and James Cameron's "Avatar," Sam Worthington is becoming the hardest working man in Hollywood

By Nam Le
Esquire Magazine

The walls of his room are covered. They have been for years. Lists. Pie charts. Graphs. Name after name after name. Some annotated, some circled or crossed out, lines going wildly in every direction. Identifying paths of least resistance.

The names are of other actors. They are of movies and directors. They are the systematic and scientific schemings of an impatient man. ("My room's like John Nash's f---ing head. I cover it with f---ing everything. As soon as I got out of drama school, I wrote down a list of every Australian actor there was, and then I went and watched all of their videos. So now I've watched every actor's work, knowing full well that no one knows mine. So then you kind of research and then you think, Well, how do I fit into that pie? Because if I'm too much like him, or I'm too much like this person, I'm never going to get a damn job. So you kind of realize where the hole is, where the gap is. Then I did the same thing in America. I researched everybody.")

And yet, it's not just about sizing up the competition, finding niches to exploit. 33-year-old Sam Worthington who makes these lists and charts uses them as prods. ("I walked up to [Danish actor] Mads Mikkelsen and said, 'I've seen every single movie you've done,' and he said, 'That's insane, but why?' And I said, 'Cause now I know where you come from, I know what work you're good at, and I know damn well you're not doing that about me.' So if it's poker, I've got the upper hand.") They are a form of power. No other actors do this. Most actors are inherently lazy. (He knows, because he was once one of them.)

So he draws up his lists, over and over again, little pie charts and graphs, his apartment decorated like a war room.

You've seen him. Months ago you saw him.

Remember those billboards, those posters on subway walls, the sides of trains and buses? That famous robotic skull stared out, its eyes glowing a malevolent red. Humanity was in peril again. The movie was "Terminator Salvation." On either side of the skull were two half-shadowed faces — the faces of our human saviors. One of them — Christian Bale's — was instantly recognizable. The other-our list maker's-was not. Yet critics agreed the upstart upstaged the superstar. Bale was just shouting, they said. The other guy, the no-name, didn't just steal Bale's scenes — he stole the movie.

You've seen him. And soon enough you'll see him again. And again.

When he left high school, Sam Worthington had no idea what to do with his life. He had no particular interests. He was living with his family in a rented house in a small outer suburb of Perth in southwest Australia.

He had a talk with his father. "I just wanna do something," he said. His father, a power-plant worker, handed him a hundred dollars and a ticket to Cairns, a city on the other side of the continent.

"I'll send you over," he told Sam, "but you figure out how to get back." ("[My sister told my father], 'I want to go somewhere hot, the islands, like Sam did,' and he was like, 'I'll send you somewhere: England, f--- you.' And she was like, 'Son of a b----.'")

Over the next few years he went walkabout, finding odd jobs as he went, eventually settling into work as a bricklayer, until one day his girlfriend told him she wanted to audition for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Australia's most prestigious drama school. He went along for moral support, put his name down on a lark. And got in. She didn't. They broke up.

So he got to work. That's what he does. Over the next decade he filled out his journeyman's CV with local film and TV roles, often working hungover, just doing the job and getting a paycheck. ("I wasn't putting in the effort. I thought you could go out, drink all night with your mates, and rock up on set and it's easy. And my belief at the time was, If you're hungover, it's hard to lie, so there are many movies I did hungover and still got praise for. They'd go, 'Man, look at him! He's so intense!' But I wasn't intense; I was just hungover.") It wasn't too different from building houses or laying bricks: Size up the plans, the materials, then build whatever the director tells you to. Drunk or sober. It didn't matter.

But then it did. At least to him. He'd had some success, won an Australian Film Institute Award and critical acclaim for his role in "Somersault," an independent film that debuted at Cannes in 2004. But he was cruising and he knew it. He was a joke. ("I looked around and went, Is this what defines me? It was just CTRL ALT DELETE. Start again. See where that goes. And I think also crossing the Rubicon at thirty kind of does that to you a bit. Once I did that and reduced myself to having nothing, then you kind of go, A, the only way is up, and B, if you've got nothing to lose, you have everything to gain, and I put myself there and I was happy.") He needed to do something else. Something other than acting, playing the game of endlessly knocking his head against the false door of Hollywood. So he sold everything he owned. The TV. His kitchenware.

He sold it all save for two bags: one for clothes. One for books.

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