NIDA has been on some headlines for some not so exciting reasons lately. First we have the political storm raged by Lynne Williams at the school causing a number of experienced staff leaving the school. Then we have Sam Worthington’s recent rant against NIDA about how he was treated badly there.
Sam Worthington graduated from NIDA in 1998, the same year with Matthew Newton. As a high school drop out and bricklayer, he auditioned for NIDA and eventually got a scholarship to get in. According to him, it was not a great experience and he said NIDA didn’t teach him how to act but keep on telling him that his accent was bad and stuff like that. Now that he is a hot property in Hollywood, so he thinks it is time to payback by discrediting what NIDA had done for him.
To be honest, that’s not much you could expect from the one who worship the ill temper of Russel Crowe. Whether Sam Worthington is a good actor still takes time to prove but personally I am not particularly impressed. He managed to steal Christian Bale’s limelight in the latest Terminator movie was simply because of the bad publicity Christian been suffering and the “hot new guy” look Sam possessed. Without either factor, I doubt Sam Worthington would actually be as popular as he is now. I had seen him in Macbeth, which is not good at all.
Back to NIDA, most people who went through it or know how it operates will know that they deconstruct you during your first year and so that you become more versatile in terms of the craft. This is a process that some of the higher ego students could not stand and either break or eventually hate it. NIDA focuses on stage acting and those articulation and voice are of prime importance, but then this part of the training exposes all the bad habits and lazy sounds that many students may have, which eventually become another source of unpleasant experience if those students think that they are too good to be criticised. Whether Sam Worthington understood why he was trained like that could be the main reason of his recent rants. Or maybe he thinks he is as good as Russel Crowe that he just need NIDA as a spring board for him and that’s all and he doesn’t need to care about a thing they try to teach him.
What Sam Worthington did in my opinion is completely ungrateful. The first thing is if he didn’t get the scholarship and the admission, he would probably still be a brick layer in Perth or spending time in run down pubs trying to chat up girls with his “hot look”. Also without NIDA even if you are an actor, you may not get a second look. The NIDA brand is a good starter for a lot of actors as you get a lot more chances to prove yourself than actors trained elsewhere. What is so lucky about Sam Worthington was being able to involve in “Somersault”, a film that I hate and still can’t understand its relevance to good cinema, which provided him a platform to become better known than others. Also his “tough guy good looks” played a part in the whole Hollywood vehicle too. However without NIDA he could just be a nobody no matter how good he looks – and there could be a lot more better looking and better actors who didn’t get a chance because they lacked the NIDA brand behind them. So with Sam Worthington, such ungrateful words from him are unforgivable. How long would he last in the business, nobody knows. But if he brings that kind of ungrateful attitude to people who helped him in his career, one day we would be buried in his own career grave. However, it could also be the fact that he was misquoted as the article was from Telegraph. But either way we will just wait and see.
