Just after his 30th birthday, Sam Worthington woke up early one morning in his rented Sydney house and had a revelation. “I looked around and thought, ‘I need to get rid of everything I own, the toaster, knives and forks, TV, the lot’. So I had an auction at my house. It was like, ‘20 bucks for the TV, do I hear 25?’

“We had a really good night of it and I made a grand total of $2000. I thought, ‘I’m 30 years old, how come I’ve only got two grand?’ ”

There was no way Sam could know that, in six months’ time, he would be starring in Avatar, the biggest blockbuster of the decade, yet it was as if, subconsciously, he was clearing the decks. Was it a premonition?

“Maybe,” he says, grinning. “I don’t know why I did it. I woke up that day and was just at the end of a tether – my career wasn’t stalling, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

“I thought, ‘I need to reboot my life. I don’t like the position I’m in.’ I think a man is defined by what he owns and I don’t like what I own.”

Two weeks later, Sam went on a taped audition in Sydney, without knowing who or what film it was for. “The attitude I had was, ‘Blow this!’ I was frustrated because, as an actor, no one tells you anything – you feel like a puppet, so I put a bit of sass on it. I was a bit rebellious.”

Within days, out of the blue, he got a call from Titanic director James Cameron’s “people”, instructing him to fly to Los Angeles for urgent talks about starring in the director’s 3-D, sci-fi action adventure. Using groundbreaking digital technology, Avatar has redefined cinema as we know it, by pulling the audience into the world they see on screen.

“I was at the top of a mountain, in the middle of winter, snowboarding,” Sam recalls. “They phoned my friend’s mobile because I don’t have one and said, ‘James Cameron wants to meet you’. I said, ‘What the hell for?’ I was like, ‘Let me get down to the bottom of the mountain because I could die and I will be there when I can’.”

James, it turns out, wanted Sam to play Jake Sully, the hero of his futuristic fantasy about a paraplegic ex-marine who is recruited by the military to take part in a mission on Pandora, a distant moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Using genetic engineering, humans on Pandora can project their mind and emotions (or consciousness) inside “avatars”, the giant blue bodies of alien hybrids, which closely resemble the native humanoid population, the Na’vi.

It’s James Cameron’s first film since Titanic, which came out in 1997, made $1.94billion and is still the most successful film of all time, holding the global box office record, although Avatar already looks set to make new box office records.

A jobbing actor and former bricklayer from Perth, Sam had made a name for himself locally in a number of small films, including 2004’s critically acclaimed Somersault, but was unknown outside Australia.

This was his big, once-in-a-lifetime break, but later that day, when he actually had a conversation with James Cameron, he had the audacity to delay the meeting. “Jim said, ‘How quickly can you get here?’ ” says Sam, “and I said, ‘Well, first I need to help my mate move a fridge and fix my car’, because I was going to give it to another mate. I got off the phone and said, ‘I think I’ve just told Jim Cameron to wait’.”

It’s indicative of his innate confidence that Sam refuses to be at anyone’s beck and call. “Jim didn’t mind,” says the actor with a grin. “He said, ‘You’re loyal and you’ve got your priorities right. Get here when you can.’ ”

The car fixed, Sam arrived in California and, still jet-lagged, met the director. “He hadn’t seen any of my work in Australia, but he said that two-minute audition was enough. He thought I was for real. The first line of my audition was, ‘Are you Jake Sully?’ and I say, ‘Yes, sir’, and then I went, ‘Uh-huh’, and Jim said, ‘You had me at uh-huh’.”

Avatar will put the actor on a fast track to stardom and colossal wealth. Yet Sam wouldn’t sign on for the project before checking out his potential boss, essentially auditioning him. Other directors would be insulted; James was impressed.

“I took Jim to dinner,” Sam explains. “He chose the place, a Greek restaurant round the corner from his house in Malibu. I asked him who his heroes were. They’re not actors, mostly astronauts and scientists. I knew other actors wouldn’t ask that because they think it is all about them. I think it’s about your relationship with the director. I went to his house, we spent time together, to find out if we were on the right track

Read more about Sam in the February issue of The Australian Women's Weekly on sale now with Lisa Wilkinson on the cover.

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