Interview: Sam Worthington

March 29, 2012Norman Wilner

WRATH OF THE TITANS directed by Jonathan Liebesman, written by Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson from a story by Greg Berlanti, Johnson and Mazeau, with Sam Worthington, Rosamund Pike, Toby Kebbell, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. A Warner Bros release. 99 minutes. Opens Friday (March 30). For venues and times, see Movies.

New York City – Two years ago, Clash Of The Titans demonstrated that there was a market for movies where Sam Worthington dons a skort and runs around fighting elaborate digital monsters as the demigod Perseus. This is not the sort of market one leaves untapped, so here Worthington is again, battling a new set of mythological beasties in the sequel, Wrath Of The Titans.

At a press conference – flanked by co-stars Liam Neeson and Toby Kebbell, director Jonathan Liebesman and co-writer Dan Mazeau – Worthington says he wanted to make a different kind of movie this time. Apparently the first one wasn’t terribly well regarded.

“I’ve been pretty vocal about how I felt about the first one and what I did in the first one,” Worthington says. “I haven’t done that [to put] the first one down at all it’s just I think it’s my responsibility to try to create a [dramatic] conduit for the action.”

For the sequel, Worthington wanted to focus on Perseus’s extended family – cousin Agenor (Toby Kebbell), son of Poseidon (Danny Huston) brother Ares (Edgar Ramírez), who fumes because their father, Zeus (Neeson), is giving the half-human Perseus too much attention. There’s also Perseus’s urge to protect his young son Helius (John Bell), which gives him a pretty good reason to throw himself in front of a fire-breathing Chimera.

“Every action scene was always ‘Okay, how does this relate to [the] family?'” Worthington explains. “If you look at the Chimera chase, it’s me chasing after my son it’s nothin’ to do with the fuckin’ monster. The second one, with the Cyclops, is more of a fun chase, but it’s me trying to go after a cousin. We drew this family story in amongst this big, spectacular blockbuster. If we lost sight of that, then some of the things I felt were misplaced and misdirected in the first one might come back to haunt us. I didn’t want that.”

Another sibling rivalry presented itself in the relationship between Zeus and Hades – which gave Neeson another chance to play dress-up with his old friend (and Schindler’s List co-star) Ralph Fiennes.

“Who said we were friends?” Neeson says in mock indignation. “No, he is, he’s one of my dearest friends, it’s terrific. When we did the first one, we found it hard to act with each other, so I would look at his forehead, and he would look at my forehead, because sometimes when we made eye contact it got quite silly. But we were more restrained this time we had a lot more deeper, darker issues to act, so we didn’t laugh as much.”

Director Liebesman, replacing Clash director Louis Leterrier, was happy to play up the story’s more personal aspects.

“It’s like a Greek Mafia movie,” he laughs. “It’s just about family issues. I remember the DP saying to me, ‘We’re shooting a lot of close-ups – I feel like we’re making a family drama.’ And I think that’s what’s so relatable about Greek mythology. It’s about screwed-up families, things that still happen today, and that’s your way in.”

Not that this is necessarily the most faithful interpretation of the stories, mind you.

“It’s not a history lesson,” Worthington says. “These movies have never been like that to me. We’ve just mined this great field of characters, situations and journeys. And that, to me, is the most exciting thing. Purists are probably gonna fuck us, but I don’t care – I like the fact that we’re mining this world to create our own mythology, to create our own canon of stories.”