Sam Worthington Reveals Most Grueling Scene in Newest 'Avatar' Was Filmed Across Six Years: 'You’re Trying to Survive—Not Drown'

This is an excerpt from Sam Worthington's feature story in the 2025 Men's Journal Fitness Special.

Sam Worthington has been drowning for much of his career. Not metaphorically, but literally—clad in a wetsuit and a hundred sensors, holding his breath for minutes at a time.

Infrared and UV cameras track his every move inside a 680,000-gallon tank while the hydrodynamically obsessed director James Cameron runs an Avatar scene over and over again. There’s a scene inAvatar: Fire and Ash, filmed three times across six years, where Jake and his son, Lo’ak, pull themselves onto a rocky ledge after a fight.

The first version, in 2017, was shot inside a tank rigged with wave machines and current movers that could generate 10-knot surges into a mock cliff to capture the physical truth of the scene: Jake hauling himself from the water, leg wounded, the exhaustion real.

But Cameron wanted to get closer to the emotion, so they did it again—same choreography, dry stage, no water, using only muscle memory. By 2023, Cameron had returned to the wet stage to revisit the scene after reworking a key exchange between father and son.

In the six years between, Britain Dalton, the actor playing Lo’ak, had grown into an adult; Worthington needed to pretend he hadn’t. They ran it again and again in the artificial surf, cameras tracking from above the water and below, each take blurring into the next—all for one minute of film.

The Men’s Journal 2025 Fitness Special hits newsstands nationwide on December 26. Pre-order your copy today!

Worthington commits. He buys into Cameron’s shooting style, informed by his expedition work—the 15-hour days, the trial and error, the hunt for truth while half-submerged. He falls less into the camp of “celebrity” and more “soldier for the cause.”

“You can pretend what water feels like—but when you’re actually in it, you stop thinking,” Worthington says. “You’re just trying to survive, to do what the scene demands, to not drown. That’s what makes it visceral, and that’s what makes it true. Everything we do is about getting past the brain. When you’re actually in it, you stop thinking.”

This is the job: Cameron’s brand of exactitude, the endless takes, the expedition-style sets.

“We don’t have clocks in that volume,” Worthington says. “Time disappears. And that’s the great thing.”

“It made us realize that our bodies are capable of doing so much more when you give them the ability to learn something new,” Zoe Saldaña says. “And we did. We amazed each other. We amazed ourselves with what we were able to do during that process. It was quite remarkable.”

Avatar might be known for its obviously fictional visuals and dazzling CGI VFX. But, as the cast makes clear, a good portion of what you're seeing on screen is startlingly real.

Avatar: Fire and Ash hits theaters worldwide on December 19.