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Avatar: Fire and Ash actor Jack Champion is sharing how he embraced his character’s minimalist look for the sequel.
Champion, 21, filmed both this year’s Fire and Ash and 2022’s The Way of Water as a teenager, years before the movies were released. In James Cameron’s Avatar movies, Champion portrays Spider, a human teenager who lives with Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri and their family of Na’vi children. The character, who grows more important to the story in Fire and Ash, wears his hair in dreadlocks and usually only sports a loincloth as a sign of his Na’vi upbringing.
“I feel like embracing, for my live action portion, embracing the fact that this guy’s mobile,” Champion tells PEOPLE of the role at the movies’ Dec. 1 premiere in Los Angeles. “He rolls around in the mud. He goes and brushes against the leaves. That was just that. If I embrace it, then it’s not uncomfortable. I just got to go 110%.”
“I mean, I was like, ‘I look pretty good. I might try to train a little bit,’ ” he adds, when asked how he felt wearing the costume. “It was interesting to finally see this character that I had imagined for so long in front of me, on me. And I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to kick up the gears a shift. This is going to really make me go 110% now.’ ”
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Spider takes on a more important role in Fire and Ash as he and Sigourney Weaver’s character Kiri deepen their connection and he develops his relationship with the villain Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is technically Spider’s father. Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Edie Falco and more star in the new movie, which is the longest installment in the Avatar series yet.
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Stefania D’Alessandro/Getty; 20th Century Studios
Asked about how he spent his days on director Cameron’s visionary set for the two Avatar sequels, Champion says, “To me, the unpredictable became the normal. I feel like it’s like, ‘Oh, I have to jump off these four different rocks and not slip.’ “
Avatar: Fire and Ash is in theaters now.
