With ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash,’ Oona Chaplin Hopes Her Fiery Turn as Varang Honors Her Family Lineage

The breakout villain of the new 'Avatar' film discusses the sexuality of her role, that explosive ending (spoilers ahead!), and why "Jim Cameron is the most similar person that I can think of to Charlie Chaplin"

[This story contains spoilers for Avatar: Fire and Ash.]

Oona Chaplin is still getting used to being the new star of a billion-dollar franchise. “My mother-in-law came to the L.A. premiere and she’s never done anything like this before, and she was sitting in the back of the car like, ‘Is it just me or does this feel really big?’” Chaplin says. “My manager was like, ‘No, no, you’ve pretty much started at the top. It doesn’t get any bigger than this.’”

Chaplin herself did not quite start out that way. The granddaughter of cinema icon Charlie Chaplin, she’s had acting in her bones her whole life, amassing screen credits over decades after getting a job at the Globe in London fresh out of drama school. Yet while she’s appeared in big projects like Game of Thrones and Black Mirror, she’s never had a stage quite like James Cameron’s Pandora. In Avatar: Fire & Ash, she makes for an explosive villain as Varang, the rageful leader of an aggressive Na’vi tribe called Mangkwan, who’ve been cast aside in their volcano dwellings and are eager to reclaim power. When she teams up with the longtime Sully nemesis Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) — both tactically and, in more of a surprise, romantically — she emerges as the greatest adversary to our heroes yet. Chaplin breathes fiery, chaotic life into the role.

It’s a landmark moment for the 39-year-old actor, with the role both introducing a major new chapter in her career and prodding some reflection on what’s led to it — both in work and in family. 

Your performance is so vivid, and very physical. I’ve spoken with some of your castmates about the freedom they feel in the way James Cameron makes these movies through performance-capture. How did the process coincide with the way you approached Varang? 

On our first day, we did the table read in the Volume on June 8, 2017.

So just the other day,

The other day, yes. It was 1746… (Laughs.) No. So we did the table read, and then very quickly after that, we all got swept away to go to Hawaii for a week of immersion. I had a feeling that it was mostly designed for the kids. They were all off in the jungle doing beautiful things together. I was left to my own devices a little bit. I did some amazing stuff in the volcano and there was something about all of it that was like, “This is odd. This feels very much like drama school.” Then we came back and it was six weeks of just preparation — the parkour, the archery, martial arts, movement design, all of these different pieces. I was over the moon, I was so happy. 

Then putting on the performance-capture suit and the helmet and then all the little pieces, it felt really easy to me. I felt very much at home. The family vibe that there is on set, there’s a kind of level of intimacy there that’s impossible to fake. People really know each other, love one another, support one another…. And I trained in theater, so for me it was just so pleasurable to be doing something physical that required imagination. It’s really like there’s no camera in between the actors, because within three minutes, you forget about the helmet camera. It felt very intimate, it felt very good, it felt very safe. It felt really natural to me.