After several years of waiting and anticipation, maverick filmmaker James Cameron has unveiled the first look at the forthcoming third installment in his massive science-fiction series, Avatar: Fire and Ash.
The first trailer for the film premiered in theaters last week before being released on Monday, and while the footage is chock-full of jaw-dropping moments, one of the most buzzed about beats featured the introduction of Oona Chaplin, Game of Thrones alum, as the villainous Varang.
The character marks a massive departure for the Avatar franchise’s established status quo and brings unexpected complexities to the larger thematic canvas that Cameron and his co-writers are weaving across the planned five-film saga.
The villains in both 2009’s Avatar and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water were explicitly human. The first film told the starkly black-and-white morality tale of the native inhabitants of Pandora, the Na’vi, and the human colonizers who sought to take it away from them and destroy it. Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully led a small team of diverging human characters, who worked through avatar bodies to help stop the humans, but still pretty starkly defined.
The second film added a bit more nuance to that dynamic, with Jake Sully and his new family encountering a different tribe of Na’vi who had different beliefs and customs, but who ultimately were still sympathetic to their cause. Notably, Stephen Lang’s Miles Quaritch, the antagonist who was seemingly killed at the end of the first film, returned in Way of Water as a clone-avatar hybrid. This development served to sour the human to Na’vi connection that had previously been held in such rarified air, and set the table for what was to come.
Oona Chaplin as Varang in ‘AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH’
— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) July 28, 2025
In theaters December 19. pic.twitter.com/2qaN0fMd8m
Now, Fire and Ash sees Jake Sully and his family encountering an outright villainous Na’vi tribe for the very first time, and the tribe is led by Oona Chaplin’s Varang. Chaplin is no stranger to fantastical landscapes and blockbuster franchises, having played Talisa Maegyr in the HBO TV series Game of Thrones for multiple seasons. Her appearance seems poised to further challenge Jake Sully and his family in deeper and more meaningful ways when the threequel is released this December.
Fascinating, Chaplin actually completed her work on the film several years ago, as a byproduct of how Cameron and co. make these films. Way of Water and Fire and Ash were filmed concurrently with one another, which is why all of the children are the exact same age in this film as they were in the previous entry.
So even though Oona Chaplin finished work on the film years ago and is hardly recognizable in the trailer, she is there, breathing life into this bold new antagonist in Avatar: Fire and Ash.