I’ve never really been a fan of Sam Worthington. There was like a split second last year when I thought he could be a Gerard Butler-esque contender on my top ten “Hot Man Buffet For the Ages” but it died a swift death when I actually read a few interviews with him. The man is dumb as a box of hair. And as for his looks… well, he’s attractive in some ways (CB certainly thinks so), but he’s a lot smaller than you realize. He’s, like, barely taller than Ryan Seacrest. But CB thinks he’s hot and Lainey thinks he’s hot, so maybe there’s something wrong with me.
Anyway, Sam is the cover boy for the April Details Magazine (full piece here), all to promote his role in the upcoming Clash of the Titans. Now, maybe it’s because I’m so jaded about this dude that I can actually see through the exceptionally bad writing over at Details, but this is not a dude with anything of significance to say. And hand him off to a bad interviewer, and you have to slog through 1000 words before you even get to one full quote from Worthington. Here are some of the highlights, from what I could understand of this drivel and assorted grunts:
On why he comes across like an idiot: Talking about himself, laying himself bare for some notepad-wielding stranger, speaking his mind only to see “the stupid things I say” come boomeranging back at him in 12-point type—he hates it. “I’m still a very boisterous young man,” he says, in his bristly Aussie accent. “And I swear a bit more than I should. So I’m learning to temper it, you know?”
He likes to work: “I hate downtime. This is the first time I’ve had time off. I hate it.”
His childhood: “I’m not a great fan of people who say they put a sheet up in the backyard when they were 7 and entertained all the neighbors,” he says. “When I was 7, I thought I was a f-cking fire truck. Growing up, you tended to just go through school to get out… then figure out what you want to do in this big ball of mud.”
So how did the Fire Truck grow up to be an actor? A dreadlocked Worthington tagged along with a girlfriend, an aspiring actress, to her audition at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. For “moral support,” he says, he auditioned alongside her. He got in; she didn’t—and promptly dumped him.
James Cameron on Worthington: “It’s hard to find a guy who works for women and for men,” Cameron says. “With a lot of actors, women love them, but they don’t inspire men. I needed someone who could lead men into battle.” Worthington, he says, “was the one who went full Shakespeare.” They met, they clicked. “He impressed me as a tough guy,” Cameron says. “He had a flintiness about him.”
Why Sam doesn‘t like the word “art”: “Artistry has a kind of weird connotation,” he says, “because you can sound like you’re going straight up your f-cking ass if you say that.”
Living in hotels: “I like room service,” he admits. “They put a chocolate on my pillow. It’s kinda cool.”
What? “Most people could say, ‘I want to be on magazine covers. I want to have enough money to buy a house,'” he says. For Worthington, however, the goal isn’t nearly so tangible. “If it was tangible,” he says, “hopefully I wouldn’t be doing it, to be honest.”
On fame: “If you start walking around in a red chinchilla, thinking you’re better than everybody,” Worthington says, “you’re going to look like a dickhead.”
Is he a diva? “Well, I demand a lot,” he says, then backtracks, not wanting to position himself as some kind of diva. “I demand excellence in myself. I’m up front and quite outspoken, but I’ll give you everything.”
[From Details]
Ugh. I mean, I get it. The guy doesn’t want to wax on and on about “the craft” or his “method”. And I applaud that, truly. I get tired of reading interviews with actors when they won’t shut up about their craft. But, it just seems like Sam doesn’t have much to say beyond that. He’s just a working actor, happy to have a job, but not really experiencing anything beyond the work. He just doesn’t have anything to say. The majority of the article is quotes from other people talking about his “simplicity” (which is code for “stupid”) and his rugged-ness (which is code for “he’s straight”).
Details photos of Sam courtesy of Details online.
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