Avatar's Sam Worthington says he was a finalist to play James Bond, Green Lantern
Avatar wasn't the only major franchise on Sam Worthington's dance card--James Bond and Green Lantern were also in the mix
Sam Worthington has the face that launched the world’s biggest film (well, sort of, when it wasn’t being digitally altered into extraterrestrial form), but other attempts at becoming a franchise leading man have been met with varied success. The Avatar: The Way Of Water star appeared in Clash Of The Titans and Terminator Salvation, but he teases some of the roles that got away in a new Variety profile.
One of them is James Bond, for which he claims to have been a finalist leading up to Casino Royale. Producer Barbara Broccoli even personally cut his hair ahead of his tuxedo-clad screen test in London. “I could play Bond as a killer, but I couldn’t get the debonair down for the life of me,” Worthington tells the outlet. “The suit did not fit.”
He also came close to DC’s 2011 flop Green Lantern. “It didn’t make much sense to me—the suit comes out of his skin?” The actor ponders. “And I was like, ‘He’s got this powerful ring that can create anything. Well, what can beat the ring?’ The answer was, ‘Nothing.’ I was like, ‘Well, something needs to beat it, or it won’t be very interesting.’”
Oh, so the human resurrected as a blue alien has something to say about the logistics of Green Lantern? Ah, well, he wasn’t missing out on much there anyway. And apparently, it wasn’t the right direction Worthington wanted for his career. “You can’t create a character if there’s nothing there. On the Clash movies, that was the problem. You were getting new pages every day, and it’s too complicated,” he shares. “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.”
Now older, wiser, and sober, this is Worthington’s philosophy on acting: “If I can’t bring anything to it, I’m not going to go and be involved in it. I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want to just be the action figure standing in the front. And that’s OK. It takes a lot to understand what you do want from this industry.”