The Teen Stars Of 'Avatar 2' Were Shocked To See Themselves As Na'vi & 'Every Tear Is Ours'

Imagine spending most of your high school years in a giant pool of water, dressed in a grey suit with dots on it and surrounded by screens and cameras. Then you go back to your life and wait for artists to turn you into the alien star of Avatar 2, one of the most expensive movies in history.

That's what growing up was like for Jamie Flatters, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, Bailey Bass and Jack Champion, who are only now getting to see themselves on Pandora in James Cameron's massive new film, Avatar: The Way Of Water.

Narcity spoke to the foursome about the intense motion-capture process of making Avatar 2 and the upcoming Avatar 3, which they all started shooting together way back in 2017.

For 13-year-old Bliss, who was a newborn when the first Avatar came out, the whole thing has taken up a significant chunk of her life. However, she says it all paid off when she first saw her Na'vi character, Tuk Sully, rendered in her full form.

"It's so exhilarating to see," she said. "She has my eight-year-old buck teeth (...) and my eight-year-old peanut body, and I just have so much love in my heart whenever I look at my Tuk. It's crazy to see her in her finished form, but I see myself in her."

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Bailey Bass, who plays the water-dwelling Na'vi Tsireya, says she learned a lot about the whole motion-capture process from Zoe Saldana, who returns as Princess Neytiri from the first film.

"The way Zoe walks as Neytiri is immediately translated to screen, and that shows how beautiful and how accurate performance capture is," she said. "Every little detail, every movement, every tear is ours, even though we are blue aliens."

All that technology also means that the actors themselves can be hard to recognize, although that's not always a bad thing.

Jamie Flatters, who plays the eldest Sully brother Neteyam, has said he appreciates the motion-capture stuff because he can remain anonymous, even though he's starring in one of the biggest films of all time.

“It’s a pleasure to play a performance as transcendent as this,” he told Narcity. “As an actor, it’s everything you look for.”

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But the film is not just a video game cutscene. There are also flesh-and-blood humans on screen, and no human gets a bigger stage than Spider, the orphaned boy who is raised as an adopted brother to Tuk and Neteyam.

Jack Champion says he also had to do plenty of motion-capture work as Spider, even though he spends a lot of time in nothing but a loincloth and a gas mask on screen.

"I had an acting troupe around me and they would wear these giant foam bodies above them," he recalled. "So it'd be like a torso, controlled arms and then a foam Na'vi face, and I just acted to that for two and a half years."

He added that the gig involved "a lot of technical stuff, but it was still a lot of fun."

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James Cameron's Avatar: The Way Of Water also stars Sam Worthington, Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Stephen Lang, Britain Dalton and Sigourney Weaver.

The Avatar sequel is playing in theatres now.