Sam Worthington: Avatar actor says his ‘arrogance’ led to ‘horrible fight’ on Wrath of the Titans

‘I could have handled things differently,’ actor said

Sam Worthington has said he regrets certain career choices after winning the lead role in Avatar.

The Australian star was plucked from obscurity to play Jake Sully in James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster, following which he was lined up to play several Hollywood roles.

One such character was Perseus in 2010’s Clash of the Titans. Worthington returned to play the character again in sequel Wrath of the Titans, which was released in 2012.

However, Worthington does not look back fondly on the experience and, in one instance, he admits he himself made the situation quite difficult.

“You can’t create a character if there’s nothing there,” Worthington said in a new interview. “On the Clash movies, that was the problem.”

He told Variety: “You were getting new pages every day, and it’s too complicated. The movies that I did right after Avatar were great big spectacles, but I should have been looking for movies that pried a little bit more into the human condition.

“I was boring myself with what I was doing. And if I’m boring myself, then I’m sure as hell going to be boring an audience.”

Worthington says that, ahead of filming the sequel, he ditched the gym and “developed a dad bod” in order to reflect Perseus’s lifestyle changes in the film.

“I looked at it as Perseus was half a god and half a dad, and he had decided that he didn’t want the god part anymore,” he said, adding: “So I decided to develop a dad bod and that I wouldn’t care what I looked like.

“Of course, that’s antithetical to what a studio wants when they pay X amount of dollars to make a movie about a chiseled hero.”

Sam Worthington in ‘Wrath of the Titans’ (Warner Bros Pictures/Kobal/Shutterstock)

He said that his “arrogance clashed with the studio and the director’s vision, and it turned into a horrible fight”.

“I could have handled things differently, instead of showing up on the first day with a big belly,” he said.

Elsewhere, he also explained how he lost out on the role of James Bond to Daniel Craig.

The actor, whose recent credits includes series Under the Banner of Heaven, can currently be seen in Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron’s first sequel since the 2009 blockbuster.

Earlier this week, Cameron reflected on the “problem” with Terminator: Dark Fate , admitting that a certain demand he made about Arnold Schwarzenegger affected the end product.

Find The Independent’s review of the film here.