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Several years ago, Oona Chaplin, who has worked steadily in Hollywood for nearly two decades on shows like Game of Thrones and Black Mirror, was contemplating a future beyond show business.
Now 39, Chaplin was spending her time far away from where movies are typically made: She volunteered at a refugee camp in France and camped out in Cuba.
“I pretty much kind of was practicing quitting acting and I built myself a tree house in the jungle in Cuba, and I was like, I’m going to live here now, so I’m done,” says Chaplin.
Around the same time, casting director Margery Simkin was looking at actresses for the Avatar franchise.
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“She had recently seen Taboo that I had been in,” Chaplin says of the gritty 2017 FX drama co-created by Tom Hardy. “And she was like, ‘Oh yeah, bring her in.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, well, I think I’ll crawl out of my tree house for Avatar.’”
And good thing she did. “It made me fall in love with acting again. It helped me also develop this immense gratitude for my profession and for the gift of telling stories that I’d kind of forgotten about,” says Chaplin, who has storytelling in her blood. Her great-grandfather was famed playwright Eugene O’Neill and her grandfather was silent movie star and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. Her parents are Doctor Zhivago actress Geraldine Chaplin and cinematographer Patricio Castilla.
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For Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment of James Cameron’s epic sci fi series about the Na’vi people on the planet Pandora, Chaplin was cast as Varang, the fierce leader of the Ash People, who are at odds with the Metkayina clan, which former human Jake (Sam Worthington) and his love Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have joined.
After working in the French refugee camp, Chaplin was “devastated” by what she saw. “I was so angry, and that anger served me very well to play Varang,” says Chaplin, whose character goes to great lengths on behalf of the Ash People.
20th Century Studios
“She’s taught me so much about conviction and integrity and the willpower actually in ways that I constantly learned. Even last night watching the filming, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, That’s a good note for my life,’” Chaplin says.
“Jim, very early on, said to me that everything that she fears, she goes right for it and then wants to destroy it. And just because it challenges her, and every time that I see something that I’m afraid of, usually my instinct is to turn away and run away, and then I have to remind myself, no, wait, and then turn around, face it, and then understand how best to deal with it,” continues Chaplin.
Feeling reinvigorated in her career, Chaplin is eager to work with Cameron again — no matter the role.
“I would be a cactus in the corner for James Cameron if he asked me to be,” she says.
Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters everywhere on Friday, Dec. 19.
