'Avatar' 's Sam Worthington Says His Wife's Ultimatum Led to His Sobriety: 'I Didn't Like Who I Was'

Sam Worthington nearly lost everything, including his wife and career, to alcohol.

He's now been sober for eight years, and the Avatar: The Way of Water star, 46, is recounting his story of addiction for the first time in the latest issue of Variety.

Following the great success of Avatar in 2009, it was commonplace for him down four or five glasses of Champagne while idling at the gate before a first-class flight, he told the magazine.

His wife Lara, whom he wed in 2014, told him she'd never seen anyone drink so much before the plane took off. "I couldn't see it," the Aussie actor said. "I thought it was normal."

He would begin drinking in the morning. "I didn't like who I was. Drinking helped me get through the day."

"Nine out of ten people couldn't tell," he said. "They could probably smell it on me, but when they looked at me, they couldn't tell. I was still doing my job — I just don't think I was doing it very well."

He had trouble with the loss of privacy that accompanies notoriety, got arrested for punching a photographer in 2014, and would get upset when fans got close.

"I'd go haywire over someone asking me for a photograph or taking a photograph of me," Worthington says. "If someone approached me, my anxiety would go through the roof."

In response to his newfound fame, he drank more heavily, which he blames on the culture he grew up in.

"In Australia, it's ingrained in the society," Worthington said. "We don't necessarily talk about AA and things like that. You don't recognize it's an illness, and you don't understand that some people are just wired differently."

He describes himself as an emotional drunk. "I got more emotional and erratic the longer I drank," he told Variety. "I don't think I was mean, exactly, but I could be belligerent, petulant."

Eventually, wife Lara had had enough. "You can do what you want, but I don't need to be around this," she told him.

And that was the catalyst it took to bring Worthington back from the brink.

The couple are now parents to Rocket, 7 ½, Racer, 6, and their younger brother, River.

Now that he's sober, he no longer cares to pursue major studios in hopes of landing a role as a generic leading man.

"If I can't bring anything to it, I'm not going to go and be involved in it," he says. "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."

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