Aussie Avatar star Sam Worthington on Fire and Ash, fatherhood and the power of love
Sam Worthington reveals how fatherhood has transformed his approach to playing Jake Sully as he prepares for the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash and a return to Australian theatre.
Battling monsters on film as a giant, blue-skinned alien and treading the boards in an intimate contemporary stage drama might literally seem worlds apart, but Sam Worthington says they are actually more similar than you might think.
The Aussie actor this month will return to the distant fictional moon of Pandora in the third chapter of James Cameron’s record-breaking Avatar sci-fi franchise, Fire and Ash.
He once again plays the human Jake Sully, who has had his consciousness transferred into the body of a 3m tall Na’vi, necessitating the use of performance capture in a hi-tech sound stage called The Volume to film the spectacular action sequences and exotic flora and fauna native to Pandora.
Then next June, New York based Worthington will head back to Australia for his first play in five years, appearing in the Sydney Theatre Company’s revival of Doubt: A Parable, a powerful, award-winning drama about morals and ethics in the Catholic Church.
Worthington says that he “learned a lot” from his previous play with the STC that paralleled with his work on Avatar – particularly the emotional scenes with his on-screen wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) – and says “it’s good to sharpen your acting tools every now and then”.
“It’s just you and the other actor and what you’re trying to do,” he says of filming in the Volume using head-mounted cameras to capture every facial expression. “Yes, we do fly Banshees … and yes, we do have bows and arrows and we jump and roll and do all the fun stuff. And we just we problem-solve that within there. But the essence is exactly the same as theatre.”
It’s been 16 years since Worthington appeared in the first Avatar movie, which defied the naysayers by becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, taking a staggering $4.8 billion dollars at the box office.
The long-awaited 2022 sequel The Way of Water – filmed concurrently with Fire and Ash – was similarly embraced, with a $3.6 billion take making it the third highest grossing film ever, and Cameron says he plans to make a fourth and fifth film if the new one is also a success.
Worthington says that Cameron promised him when he first started that everything he did as an actor would be captured through his “digital mask” and the improvements in the trailblazing technology in the intervening years have now got to the point where “I can see exactly every nuance now”.
“It’s caught up to the nuance and then it’s surpassed it because now it’s like ‘oh shit, now we don’t even have to do half as much’,” he says. “Like a traditional movie, you can just have the thought and the thought translates and that’s what he was always telling me 20 years ago.”
Even so, he still sometimes struggles to explain just how the complicated process that sits somewhere between live action and computer animation works. One of his friends thought he just read the lines at a podium and all the scenes were animated afterwards. Another asked him how long it took him to be painted blue, leading Worthington to politely point out that he wasn’t in fact three metres tall either.
“Once people understand how we do it and that we do everything in it, there’s a different respect for what we do,” he says. “And I think it’s a bit more interesting. If anything, it’s digital make-up.”
Fire and Ash picks up just weeks after the events of The Way of Water, with Jake and Neytiri mired in grief after the loss of their son Neteyam in a fierce battle with the rapacious human corporation called the Resources Development Administration. While the exact story details are a closely guarded secret, it’s been revealed that Jake and his family will encounter a new Na’vi tribe, the aggressive Mangkwan, who have allied with the RDA and his mortal enemy Quaritch (Stephen Lang).
“That’s the thing – that was a battle,” says Worthington of the second movie’s epic climax. “That wasn’t a war. It might seem big, but the war is obviously coming.
“This is how we have to make a stand as a family because their family’s been tested and they’re all struggling with trauma and grief. You can’t play that, but you can play the resilience of how to get out of that and how they get out of it is they have to remember how much they love each other. That’s what this movie’s going to show – the power of love and how that can fight against any fear.”
Ahead of filming, Worthington talked to some people who shared experiences of losing children but as a father himself with wife Lara, he says “it’s something … you don’t even want to think about”. Both he and Saldana have three boys and became parents around the same time and Worthington says that fatherhood has changed the way he approaches the role of Jake, and continues to do so as Rocket, Racer and River get older.
“That’s the trigger that went off when you have them,” Worthington says of his protective instincts. “It’s not something you sit down and think about. I think it literally it just happens. You’re just going, ‘I’ll run through fire for this little bug’.
“I’ll put my life on the line for these boys and that’s it. And my boys get in to a lot of trouble all the time. They’re always up to no good and they’re always getting hurt or injuring each other in fun ways and touch wood that’s the most it gets to. But you always have it in the back of your mind … it never leaves you and it does get amplified the older they get. Bigger kids, bigger problems.”
Worthington says that he and Lara work hard to keep their children out of the spotlight and while 10-year-old Rocket is starting to show an interest in coming on set and talking to the crews, to 9-year-old Racer and 5-year-old River, “I’m just Dad”.
“This was my choice and my crazy world that I’m getting into, and I want them to have their own crazy world and crazy experiences” Worthington says. “So, it just became a natural response to me, protecting. My dad never really took me to hang out with his mates or to the power station. He came home and gave me himself 100 per cent. He wasn’t split, so I wanted to do the same with them.”
It’s been 25 years since Worthington’s first big-screen appearance in Bootmen and his first TV roles in local stalwarts Water Rats and Blue Heelers. And while he’s had lead roles in huge Hollywood blockbusters such as Terminator: Salvation, Clash of the Titans and Kevin Costner’s Horizon saga, Worthington has also regularly returned home to work.
“My career started in Australia,” he says. “That’s where I started this journey, so I’ve always been of the belief of you give back to your industry as best you can. And if me being involved in a project helps get that story told, then I’m always on the lookout for that.”
Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in cinemas December 18.
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Originally published as Aussie Avatar star Sam Worthington on Fire and Ash, fatherhood and the power of love
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