Sam Worthington on 'Man on a Ledge'

A few weeks before James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar hit cinemas and became the most successful film of all time, I interviewed the film’s star Sam Worthington, at that time unknown. Unassuming and fantastic company, the Australian actor assured me (like all up-and-coming actors do) that success in Hollywood would not affect him.

Obsessed by acting and aware that his anonymity was about to vanish, he was resolutely determined to continue leading an ordinary life.

For example, he told me he didn’t even own a mobile and had no intention of buying one.

Two years on, I am speaking to Worthington again about his latest film, a hugely entertaining action thriller called Man on a Ledge. As we sit side by side on a cream sofa in the opulence of a Beverly Hills hotel suite, the cynic in me wonders whether he has indeed changed. He doesn’t look any different. With a few days’ growth, his hair cropped, he is ruggedly handsome with a strong jawline and vivid blue eyes, dressed in jeans, a Hawaiian tourist T-shirt and old moccasins which, he says, “I borrowed from my mate”. As we chat, the 35-year-old former bricklayer from Perth finishes a big dish of ice cream, topped with whipped cream, then reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper full of scribbled phone numbers of people he has promised to call: evidence that he has stuck to his guns. No iPhone or BlackBerry? “No, I’m not making a statement, I just don’t like phones. I don’t like it when people ring me, It’s like ‘leave me alone’.” He chuckles. “Write me a letter. My agents hate it because they can’t get hold of me but my belief is that we survived for many years without cell phones and we still got hold of each other.

“My life is still the same,” he insists. “There is a fantastical element to my job because there is loads of glitz and glam attached to it. But I don’t like all that, I didn’t get into this to have my photo taken. If I wanted to be famous I would go on Big Brother.” Worthington has that kind of thick Australian accent that comes with an assumption of matey street cred. No wonder he’s frequently compared to another actor, Russell Crowe. “If you want to, you can roll around with a big old entourage, you can think the sun shines out of you,” he says. “But if you want a normal life where you walk the dog and do the shopping, you can do that as well. What do you think Brad Pitt’s doing? Is he jet skiing on the Riviera all the time? No, he’s at home changing nappies.”

Some facets of Worthington’s life have inevitably altered. Earlier in his career he said he had no intention of putting down roots. Suburbia and the white picket fence was anathema to him. “When I’m 60 maybe I’ll settle down,” he told me, also admitting that relationships were difficult because of his intense approach to work. “I wouldn’t want to live with me,” he joked. Together with his girlfriend at the time, Natalie Mark, he moved gipsy-like from hotel room to hotel room, depending on the film role. The couple split up a year ago. Recently, however, he bought a house in Hawaii (hence the T-shirt). “Yeah I got a place. I got a dog – a King Charles spaniel called Bacon that I got in England – so the dog needed a home.” Worthington sprawls on the sofa and laughs. “He was getting sick of hotel rooms. And NO I’m not going to tell you which island.” I point out that it doesn’t take much detective work to figure it out, since his T-shirt advertises kayaking on a particular island. Still, he fears attracting paparazzi.

Why Hawaii? “It’s sunny and beautiful and beachy, I like the lifestyle, I like the people. I like the culture. You climb a coconut tree, get a coconut, sit there with your dog and eat it.” There, he says, people are barely aware that he’s a movie star; rather, he’s known as “the dude who lives up the road who has good coconut trees and a funny dog”. He tells me that he has a new girlfriend, although he won’t divulge her name and says she is not an actress. “She hangs out with me, she doesn’t need a job,” he grins, adding he is learning to separate work from his home life. “I think I’m still a very difficult person to live with, because my motor’s always running, but you try as you get older to slow that down and live life at a calmer pace. My lifestyle is extremely weird, so if you can be with a girl and have a level of normalcy, then travelling around the world doing this kind of thing seems like a holiday adventure.”

Even James Cameron – a director whose exacting standards have driven other actors to the edge of insanity – was impressed with his leading man’s Spartan lifestyle and Herculean work ethic on Avatar, which involved gruelling 18-hour days for 14 months. The actor himself compares the Avatar experience to “going to war” and clearly thrives on challenge – the tougher the better. He spends most of his latest film standing on a narrow ledge outside a hotel room window, 200 feet above the ground, threatening to jump. Worthington has a fear of heights, something he says he “forgot” when he signed up to the film. “I had to man up and do it,” he says. “I was lucky I didn’t burst into tears and go into a fetal position because that wouldn’t have been a very good start to the film.” A broad grin flashes across his face. “It’s called Man on a Ledge d---head! Get out of the window!”

Man on a Ledge is pure escapist entertainment that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Worthington is an ex-cop jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, who sets out to prove his innocence by orchestrating a heist with his brother (a lively Jamie Bell). Ed Harris is the villain, and owner of the building with the ledge Worthington spends much of the film perched on. He wore a safety strap that jammed like a seat belt when he fell. And when that happened he’d “hang like a marionette. Your life flashes before your eyes, before it clicks and you go, that was it?”

Success has certainly not gone to Worthington’s head. If anything it appears to have given him a grave sense of duty about his position, a responsibility to give the audience more bang for their buck: “If a guy who works in a power plant 12 hours a day all week goes with his family of four to see a movie, that’s a lot of money out of his pocket.”

Self-effacing to a fault, he is constantly questioning himself, course-correcting, concerned about the effect he has on others. He confesses that he regrets the techniques he used to get into the mindset of the character he played in 2010’s Last Night, a romantic drama with Keira Knightley. “I tried to be real method and I think my ‘method’ backfired on me,” he says. “I screwed up.” In the film he and Knightley play a married couple who’ve become distant and complacent. In the first week of rehearsal Worthington was friendly, and they socialised together. But he was struggling to get into the role, so in the second week he was distant – so distant that he stopped turning up for rehearsals. “I thought if I treat her with complacency maybe that might help,” he says. “In my head, I thought my character should be a bit of a jerk. So then Keira started to hate me, obviously. But to me that meant things were going well: we had nailed our relationship right there! But she just thought I was a jerk – and I WAS a jerk,” he shouts. “I won’t use that method again.” Has she forgiven him? “I’ve seen her since and she’s cool.”

Nor has Worthington forgiven himself “for letting down” everyone who paid to go and see him in Clash of the Titans, the 2010 film that was panned for the acting and the quality of the 3D. “I was disappointed with my performance,” he says. “I was a f------ bland action dude. I don’t think I created a character and I screwed up. When it comes to 3D, I’ve been in the movie that got revered the most [Avatar] and the movie that got slated the most,” he grins.

Despite the slatings, the film was a staggering box-office hit and a sequel, Wrath of the Titans, comes out this summer. “I’m so lucky I’ve got a second chance. In this one Perseus is the type of archetypal hero that I want to see on screen. It’s 10 years on and he’s now a dad. So I said ‘let’s not make him a superhero even though he’s half god, let’s make him a normal dad who has trouble running, who’s out of breath, who’s scared and realises he can’t save the world’. I like it when heroes get hurt because they’re unfit. Mel Gibson did it perfectly in the Lethal Weapon series; you feel the pain.”

Off screen the actor has an intriguing mix of humility and confidence. The balance I suspect stems from his childhood. Born in Surrey, his parents Ronald and Jeanne emigrated to Australia when he was a baby; he was raised in Perth with his sister Lucinda. “They were normal working-class people, my dad worked in a power plant, my mum used to clean people’s houses and she looked after old people.” There were no thoughts of acting.

It was his father who persuaded Worthington to leave Perth at 18 and travel around Australia. In Sydney, he accompanied his then girlfriend on an audition to Nida (The National Institute of Dramatic Art). She didn’t get in, he won a place, the relationship ended and the young actor (who’d worked at a variety of jobs from bricklaying to nannying) discovered that he had talent. Television and film roles followed including an award-winning performance in the Australian film Somersault. After he lost out to Daniel Craig for Bond (after reportedly telling Casino Royale director Martin Campbell that his take on 007 was wrong), Cameron cast him as Jake Sully in Avatar on the strength of a two-minute audition tape. Cameron, along with Russell Crowe, then recommended him for a role opposite Christian Bale in Terminator Salvation. “He’s the guy who changed my life, full stop,“ he says of Cameron. “I can email him and phone him about anything.” Indeed, Worthington recently had an idea for a film and showed it to Cameron, who agreed to produce the project.

“He does it because he’s my mate and he’s that kind of guy. He wouldn’t do it if it was a dumb idea.” Avatar has allowed him to buy a car for his sister (even though she didn’t want one) and a house for his parents. “They said they wanted to live in Tasmania. I said ‘Fair enough but who wants to live in Tasmania?’ They’re never there though, they say it’s freezing. I said ‘It’s f------ Tasmania!’ So they go on holiday to hot places.”

It’s also given Worthington clout in Hollywood, which he has used to help get financing for his friends’ films, such as the Seventies-era surfing drama Drift. “It’s a fictional tale about the beginning of the surf brands, like Ripcurl and Quicksilver. I told my mates ‘I’ll help you out, I’ll play this small part in it’, that got them the money.” A lifelong surfer himself – “I like to hit the waves hard” – he doesn’t surf in the film, instead playing a photographer. “I didn’t want to outshine my mate and I rocked up on set with big beard, a big beer belly and rainbow-tipped hair extensions. I said, ‘I’m only going to wear wetsuit shorts’. My mate (Myles Pollard) goes, ‘Man you look totally ridiculous, like a big fat seal’. I said, ‘What do you want? Mr Glitzy Hollywood? This is the character. You’re the lead man, you’re the one who has to look good’.”

Cameron once described Worthington as being “the opposite of narcissistic”. So he has no vanity? “Not when it comes to the job.” He must, I point out, be aware that he is considered a heart-throb. The comment elicits hilarity. “You should see me in the morning when I’m hung-over, there’s nothing heart-throbic about that. Oh my God!” He collapses into the sofa. “Even the dog runs.” Though he spent two months learning Krav Maga for his role as a Mossad agent in The Debt, Worthington says the only exercise he takes other than surfing is walking Bacon: “You can barely pay me to go to the gym, I hate it.” I tell him he looks fit and muscular. “I don’t consider these muscles,” he says, flexing his biceps. “My mate would laugh if he heard that, he would call them chicken arms.”

This year the actor is making an Iraq war movie that uses Avatar’s motion capture technology with Scottish actor Gerard Butler. “I like Gerry he’s a good bloke, he’s my mate.” Then, of course, there is Avatar 2. As with the first film, it’s shrouded in secrecy. But rumour has it Sigourney Weaver will somehow come back from the dead, it will be set partly underwater, and may be in cinemas in 2014. What can Worthington say? “I can tell you it’s directed by James Cameron, that’s about it.”

When asked if he has any other ambitions left, Worthington’s answer is disarming, to say the least. “I wouldn’t mind doing a comedy,” he says, “with me, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.” At which point I burst out laughing. “See, you’re already laughing, so we’re on the right track. It would be awesome.”

‘Man on a Ledge’ is out now in cinemas

This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine. Follow SEVEN on Twitter @TelegraphSeven