Oona Chaplin had to wait eight years between being cast in “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and seeing the finished film. But the British-Spanish-Swiss actress — grand-daughter of Charlie Chaplin and great-grand-daughter of Eugene O’Neill — didn’t mind. “There’s a part of me that would have been happy with just the process,” Chaplin said of filming the third chapter in James Cameron’s epic sci-fi/fantasy series, which shot back to back with “Avatar: The Way of Water.” “It was such a rich and satisfying process as an artist, as a person.”
Chaplin plays Varang, the tortured, manipulative and kinky leader of the Ash People of the Mangkwan, a former forest tribe on the moon Pandora whose home was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Though the actress has been working steadily in Europe for almost 20 years and was in “Game of Thrones” — her Talisa Stark was one of the victims of the infamous Red Wedding — her stand-out performance in “Fire and Ash” is bringing her a greater level of attention on this side of the pond.
To portray Varang, Chaplin had to enter the Volume, a warehouse-like space where she and her costars used motion-capture suits, head-mounted cameras to catch emotions and props to lend tactility to these performances.
To the casual observer, the Volume may not look like much: a barren, open room filled with only the necessary objects. To performers like Chaplin, this stark environment became an immersive playground. “I could always kind of see Eywa there,” Chaplin said, referring to the nature goddess of Pandora. “There’s a thick energy in the Volume that is palpable to anybody that works there. It’s an unmistakable vibe, and so it’s a mysterious place.”
For the actors, the world of Pandora is one of imagination. While audiences only travel to the realm once it’s fully rendered in bleeding-edge, industry-pushing VFX, the cast sees Pandora merely as a series of crates, props, water tanks, mo-cap rigs and whatever they can conjure up in their minds. “The focus that is required in the workings of our imagination, I feel like I could lean on my theater background and revive it within me in a way that was really fun,” Chaplin said.
It’s only natural that she would excel at this kind of acting. Charlie Chaplin was one of the greats of physical comedy, a master at conveying emotion through body language alone. He was also an acclaimed and precise director who could execute grand and complex sequences during the early stages of cinema, both in front of and behind the camera. The “Fire and Ash” star sees a lot of these same traits in Cameron, a director she praised for his ability to make his actors feel safe on the groundbreaking set.
“Working with him has been incredible,” she said. “I feel like it’s the closest I’ve ever been to working with my grandfather.” Cameron pushed Chaplin to plumb Varang’s deepest emotions, which kept her from becoming an archetypal villain. As Mangkwan burned, Varang begged Eywa for help, but the goddess never arrived. Chaplin drew inspiration from real-world fires and disasters to inform her character’s anguish.
“I really tried to honor her pain,” she said. “There was a horrendous fire at Grenfell Tower (in London in 2017), and I know people that died, I know people that lost family. Even if you didn’t know anybody in the building, it traumatized the neighborhood. So I’ve seen what fire can do.”
Varang lies at the heart of “Fire and Ash’s” themes, representing the darkest chapter yet of Cameron’s saga. Chaplin described her character as a “hurt little girl,” one who took her trauma and training as a spiritual leader in waiting and twisted it, worshipping a “more powerful god” embodied by the ravaging flames.
“The cycles of suffering are not exclusive to humans,” Chaplin said. “The pattern, the blueprint for destruction, destructive forces, is universal. That’s a really smart thing to put on Pandora.”
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.Read more from the issue here.
