'Acting happened by chance at an audition'

The 33-year-old Australian actor says that he always wanted to get out of the small town he grew up in and that acting came to him ‘by chance’ when he accompanied his girlfriend for an audition and instead landed up getting selected.

During a recent press interaction to promote James Cameron’s latest action adventure epic Avatar, where he plays the lead role, Sam was asked if he always wanted to make a career on the big screen. He replied, “Not at all! Nobody dreamed of acting or movies where I came from. Where I grew up mate, you barely had a movie house or a video store, let alone thinking you would ever have your head on a poster, so I didn’t even go there. My dream was to get out of town.”

“I was a bricklayer. I built houses and the acting came about because of a girl. I was 19 and met a girl who wanted to go to the premiere drama school in Australia, NIDA, where Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett and many others went. She had an audition and I auditioned with her for moral support, to cheer her on. I just made my way through it in my own way and they said ‘keep going, keep going’, so the audition kept going and then eventually they said, ‘would you like to come and spend three years here?’ I got in, she didn’t and that was it. She dumped me a week later!”