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Sam Worthington is teasing a devastating “division” in the upcoming Avatar sequel.
Avatar: Fire and Ash, in theaters Dec. 19, will bring back Worthington’s Jake Sully, Zoe Saldaña’s Na’vi warrior Neytiri and their Pandora-dwelling family that was introduced in 2022’s sequel Avatar: The Way of Water. But, as the Australian actor recently said, there’s trouble in paradise.
“Jake and Neytiri share this painful wound,” Worthington, 48, told Empire Magazine, referring to the characters’ loss of their eldest child, Neteyam, in the previous installment. “They can’t seem to heal each other.”
The parenting pair “kind of split, not because they want to, but because they’re just trying to survive within themselves,” he revealed. “Jake heads back to battle and Neytiri kind of closes down… He doesn’t know how to go forward, and so he goes back to the world that he knows, which is soldiering. To attack, to go to war, that’s a comforting place for Jake.”
James Cameron, the writer-director-producer of the hit franchise, told Empire that Fire and Ash picks up just two weeks after the events of The Way of Water. “Everybody in this movie is reacting from a place of trauma,” said the Oscar-winning filmmaker, 70.
While Worthington’s character is “processing the death of his son,” Cameron said, the same goes for Neteyam’s brother Lo’ak (played by Britain Dalton). “I think if you’re authentic about life and emotion and relationships, it doesn’t matter how crazy your world-building is,” he added.
20th Century Studios.
“Because of Neteyam’s death, there is now a division in that relationship,” Worthington said of Jake and Neytiri. “That’s a great design by [Cameron] — how do you split apart the perfect love story?”
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Speaking to PEOPLE in August 2024 at Disney’s D23 expo, Cameron said he had a metric for an Avatar movie’s effectiveness: whether it brings the waterworks. “If I can’t cry in the movie, I know I’ve failed seriously,” he said at the time.
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Avatar: Fire and Ash, costarring Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Oona Chaplin, Cliff Curtis, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Jack Champion, Bailey Bass and Kate Winslet, is in theaters Dec. 19. Meanwhile, the original 2009 Avatar film and Avatar: The Way of Water are both streaming on Disney+.
