Sam Worthington

• 1. Introduction

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  Sam Worthington was handed $400 and a one-way trip to Cairns, in Queensland, by a father who told him to "work his way home." There was no safety net, and no promise that the journey would lead anywhere. Today he is known around the world as a leading man in Hollywood blockbusters. How does someone sent off with a handful of cash end up there? Why did he keep choosing such different films, from creature features to war dramas to westerns? And what did sudden fame take from him along the way?

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• 2. Surrey To Warnbro

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  On the 2nd of August 1976, Samuel Henry John Worthington was born in Godalming, a town in Surrey, in South East England. His parents were English. When he was only six months old, the family moved to Perth, in Western Australia, and he grew up in Warnbro, a suburb of Rockingham.

  His mother, Jeanne, born Jeanne Martyn, kept house. His father, Ronald, worked as a labourer at a power plant. He also has a sister named Lucinda.

  Rockingham Senior High School came first. Then he moved to John Curtin College of the Arts in Fremantle, a school that specialises in the dramatic arts. He studied drama there but left without graduating.

  After the Cairns trip, he picked up construction work and odd jobs, and eventually settled in Sydney. At 19, while working as a bricklayer, he auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art. The school accepted him and gave him a scholarship. Screen work would follow soon, beginning with television guest roles in 2000.

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• 3. Home Ground

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  Bootmen, an Australian dance film from 2000, gave Worthington a small role alongside Adam Garcia. Two lead parts came next, in Dirty Deeds in 2002 and Gettin' Square in 2003.

  In 2004 he took a major role in Somersault. It won him the AFI Award for Best Lead Actor, the highest film honour in Australia. The same year he began appearing in the acclaimed television series Love My Way, playing Howard, the main love interest of the female lead.

  The Great Raid, a Hollywood production filmed in Australia, arrived in 2005. Worthington played a series of small parts in it, and that was how his international film career began. Around then he also auditioned for James Bond in Casino Royale, but the part went to Daniel Craig.

  In 2006 he played the lead in a modern retelling of Macbeth. A year later came Rogue, an Australian creature-feature that earned a 100% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes. His next big break would come from a director who had not yet told him what the part was.

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• 4. Cameron's Gamble

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  At about 30 years old, Worthington sold most of what he owned and bought a car with the proceeds. He was living in that car when he auditioned for Avatar. In November 2010 he told GQ Australia that nobody had said what the role was for, and that this irritated him. He believed that "Jim saw a spark and liked it." He linked that to Jake Sully, a man who hates being bullied and wants to set things right.

  Avatar, released in 2009 and directed by James Cameron, cast him as Jake Sully, a paraplegic former U.S. Marine. Sully is caught in a war between his own species and the Na'vi, the indigenous people of Pandora. The film grossed more than $2.8 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of all time. It brought Worthington a Saturn Award for Best Actor and another AACTA Award.

  Cameron's support did not stop there. His personal recommendation to the filmmaker McG won Worthington the part of Marcus Wright, a human-terminator hybrid, in Terminator Salvation. Christian Bale was his co-star. The film opened on the 21st of May 2009, earned over $371.4 million and drew mixed reviews. Worthington later said that Cameron "changed his life," and that he will always be grateful. Early 2010 would give him his first film as the headline name.

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• 5. Studio Headliner

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  Louis Leterrier directed Clash of the Titans, an action fantasy produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Critics were generally negative, yet it grossed $493 million worldwide and ranked as the 11th highest-grossing film of 2010. Wrath of the Titans followed in 2012. Reviews were mostly negative again, and its $302 million take, though a success, fell short of the first film.

  In 2010 he also voiced Captain Alex Mason, the hero of the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. Some gamers complained that he could not hide his Australian accent, just as in Avatar. He returned as Mason in Call of Duty: Black Ops II in 2012.

  November 2010 brought a notable mention. The Hollywood Reporter named him among the young male actors who were either pushing or being pushed to take over Hollywood. Forbes also placed him among Hollywood's highest-grossing actors that year. He was chosen for the 2011 edition of Who's Who in Australia.

  Asger Leth directed Man on a Ledge in 2012, with Worthington as Nick Cassidy. Reviews were mixed, but The New Zealand Herald described his performance as "suitably terrified." The next year he took a very different job in Drift, an Australian film about the birth of the surf industry in the 1970s.

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• 6. Range Over Spectacle

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  Arnold Schwarzenegger was Worthington's co-star in the 2014 action thriller Sabotage, a loose adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. Reviews were generally negative and it became a box office bomb. Cake, headlined by Jennifer Aniston, debuted in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, with Worthington in the cast. That year he also played a supporting role in the western The Keeping Room.

  Robert Connolly directed Paper Planes, an Australian 3D children's drama released in 2015. Its hero is Dylan, a boy who discovers a talent for making paper planes and dreams of competing at the World Paper Plane Championships in Japan. Worthington then played Willem Holleeder in Kidnapping Freddy Heineken, based on the 1983 kidnapping of Freddy Heineken. In Baltasar Kormákur's Everest, based on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, he played Guy Cotter. The film grossed $203 million worldwide.

  Mel Gibson directed Hacksaw Ridge, in which Worthington played Captain Jack Glover, a stern army officer. The film follows Desmond Doss, an American combat medic and pacifist who refused to carry any weapon in World War II. It opened in the United States on the 4th of November 2016, earned $180.4 million and drew critical acclaim. In 2017 he worked with Stuart Hazeldine on The Shack, a Christian drama based on a 2007 novel. It opened to mixed reviews but took in over $96 million. That year he also played Jim Fitzgerald in the Discovery Channel series Manhunt: Unabomber.

  Netflix released The Titan, a science fiction thriller, in 2018. In 2019 he played Ray Monroe in the Netflix thriller Fractured. He took a supporting part in Lansky, a 2021 crime drama starring Harvey Keitel about the gangster Meyer Lansky. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun Times praised the chemistry between Keitel and Worthington. In 2021 he also led Tim Sutton's western The Last Son and appeared in the Australian ABC drama Fires. His next film would send him back to Pandora.

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• 7. Return To Pandora

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  In Avatar: The Way of Water, released in 2022, Jake Sully's family flees to the sea and joins the reef clans. Together they try to protect their home from returning human invaders. The film earned over $2.320 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of 2022 and the third-highest of all time. It also earned Worthington a Best Actor nomination at the 51st Saturn Awards.

  The miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven arrived the same year, with Worthington as Ron Lafferty across seven episodes. It received positive reviews and high viewership ratings. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 27th Satellite Awards for the role.

  During 2024, Worthington took supporting roles in a string of projects. Kevin Hart led the Netflix heist comedy Lift. Other titles included the dystopian science fiction film Breathe and The Exorcism, directed by Joshua John Miller, with Russell Crowe. He was also in John Woo's Peacock action film The Killer and David Mackenzie's thriller Relay. Kevin Costner directed the two Horizon: An American Saga films, in which Worthington played First Lieutenant Trent Gephardt. His Avatar co-star Giovanni Ribisi was in them too.

  Mackenzie's Fuze, released in 2025, grew out of that collaboration. Worthington wanted to work with the director again, and he asked to be written into the film. It centers on an unexploded bomb found at a London construction site, and he played X, the leader of a band of criminals. Fuze premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and received positive reviews.

  In Avatar: Fire and Ash, the Sully family faces the Ash People, a vengeful volcanic clan allied with humans. Their presence challenges the family's bond with Eywa. Thomas Butt of Collider called Worthington's performance understated and said he had fully matured in the role. Butt especially praised how he portrays Jake's inner conflict between his human instincts and his adopted Na'vi customs. Next up is the 2026 film Zero A. D., in which Worthington plays Antipater in a dramatization of the events around the Massacre of the Innocents.

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• 8. Trouble And Family

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  On the 23rd of February 2014, Worthington was arrested in New York City for assault after punching the paparazzo Sheng Li. Li had followed the model Lara Bingle, whom Worthington had confirmed as his partner on the 18th of October 2013, to get a "perfect picture." Worthington said Li kicked Bingle and that he stepped in. Video of the incident shows him calling Bingle his "wife," which fed speculation about their marital status. He was released on a desk appearance ticket, while Li was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment, assault and harassment.

  Three days later, on the 26th of February, Worthington appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court. He was ordered to stay away from Li for six months. The case was adjourned until the 8th of May 2014, and he faced charges of third-degree assault, attempted assault and harassment. On the 1st of April, Li blamed Bingle for starting the fight and called for her arrest. Later that month, Worthington reached a conditional discharge deal on a misdemeanour assault charge, so he avoided jail. The charges against Li were dismissed "in the interest of justice." Li then filed a $3.7 million civil lawsuit, which was settled out of court before it went to trial in September 2015.

  Worthington is a Christian and a recovering alcoholic. He says he began drinking heavily to cope with the loss of privacy that followed the release of Avatar. He stopped after Bingle gave him an ultimatum, and he has been sober since 2014.

  Worthington and Bingle married on the 28th of December 2014. They have three sons, born in 2015-2016 and 2020. He is also a vegetarian. His youngest son was born two years before The Way of Water reached cinemas.

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