Sam Worthington, work in progress. Photo: Getty Images
Steve Dow, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Sam Worthington is somehow different. It's mid-afternoon in a hotel room on a stunning blue day and this is the last in a day of interviews. ''It must be beer o'clock,'' the 35-year-old star of the world's highest-grossing film, Avatar, says, wearing a T-shirt, jeans and a couple of days' ginger stubble.
It's the sort of thing you can imagine the English-born, Perth-raised former brickie saying on a building site. That's it: Sam Worthington went to Hollywood and has returned more relaxed.
I last interviewed him in 2006, when he was still calling Australia home - the year after he'd flown to London to screen test as James Bond. He'd come across as blokey and friendly then, too, but his approach seemed more intense. Much.
On the day in 2005 that he appeared at Pinewood studios to test for 007 director Martin Campbell, for instance, Worthington, having been asked if he was enjoying London, brusquely replied: ''No, I'm not. I'm here to do the job.
''Here's the thing: you say Bond's smart, sophisticated and suave and he's trained to be a killer. I've read all the [Ian Fleming] books now and watched all the movies. And he's not.''
Whether Worthington's forthright theory that Bond was first and foremost a thug trained to be debonair held sway we'll never know because Daniel Craig was cast in Casino Royale. Worthington went on to play Macbeth, with Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy recast in Melbourne's gangland wars, for which he insisted the Scottish king be not the ditherer of lore but hold himself as honourable. Yet Worthington had prophesied the critical toil and trouble: ''I reckon we're gonna get crucified,'' he said back then, ''a bunch of convicts doin' the Bard's words.''
I tell Worthington I've got some perspective on his career trajectory thanks to his old Macbeth interview. ''Me too,'' he laughs heartily. ''You brought up that dog, thanks.''
Perhaps one reason he's laughing now is that last year, he settled in Hawaii after four gypsy years around Los Angeles. Now he can swim and surf with his new girlfriend close by.
Although he won't name her, it seems London's Daily Mail was right with its speculative paparazzi photo captions of the couple together after he split from film stylist Natalie Mark last January after three years.
Undoubtedly, Worthington's life changed when director James Cameron cast him in Avatar - the tale of a race of tall blue people - and a fantasy action hero was born, advancing with confidence in Terminator Salvation and Clash of the Titans.
But before Hollywood could change him, Worthington changed himself. Months after the Macbeth interview, aged 30, Worthington took to heart the poem If by Rudyard Kipling, which was given to him by a friend, producer John Schwarz.
The poem reads in part: If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss/And lose, and start again at your beginnings … Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it/And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son.
''I didn't like the person that I was,'' Worthington now says. ''I had a great career, I just didn't like me - how I interacted with people, who I was becoming.''
He was selfish? ''Yeah, a lot of stuff like that. And you're crossing 30. In your 20s, you think you've got it figured out, you think you know who you're becoming, and you get to 30 and you go, 'This is it, warts and all.' It's going to be hard to change who you are by that time. I didn't like it. I don't know, there was something about the person I was I didn't like. It's hard to describe.''
He sold his possessions and spent months living out of a car or on friends' couches - including the sofa he'd sold to a mate.
''Everything in my house reminded me of something - you remember where you bought your jeans from; you remember where you and your ex-girlfriend bought the flat-screen TV. Every time I looked at something, it reminded me of things I didn't want to be reminded of. So I just got rid of it.''
Amid this early midlife crisis, James Cameron called, having seen an audition tape. Worthington's great second act was born. Next, he'll begin filming Avatar 2, this time set under water, for which he will have scuba-diving lessons.
In the meantime, Worthington's latest movie is Man on a Ledge, a taut, nail-biter directed by Asger Leth. The film is pure popcorn but nonetheless brilliantly made, not least because Worthington, playing a former cop trying to clear his name, spends most of it literally standing on a 35-centimetre window ledge on a specially built floor on top of the Roosevelt Hotel 60 metres above New York, his lifeline harness not visible thanks to CGI.
Worthington is determined to give moviegoers value for the price of their tickets. He told David Letterman that Australians come to Hollywood to work ''and we don't want to waste your time'', an ethic born of growing up in an industrial town on the West Australian coast, where his dad worked in an aluminium refinery.
''My dad had to work for everything in his life, so did my mum; she cleaned people's houses and looked after old people.
''You can be complacent and sit on the couch and complain about the dreams that you missed. Get off the couch!''
■Man on a Ledge is now screening.
