When James Cameron and casting director Margery Simkin began the casting process for the 2009 sci-fi adventure “Avatar,” they faced a challenge as immense as Pandora (the vast moon that the film’s Na’vi people call home). The scope of the visionary project meant looking for actors able to perform a delicate blend of live and simulated performances.
The first “Avatar” movie’s cast included both established talent and relative newcomers. Simkin says the film presented brand-new casting challenges as it mixed motion capture with live-action sequences. She also had to find performers who could convincingly express emotion through a yet-to-be-created language. The CD had to do all this under a massive veil of secrecy.
How to Get Cast in an ‘Avatar’ MovieCasting the main characters in “Avatar”
Sam Worthington as Jake Sully: Simkin believes her greatest discovery with this film was the then-unknown Worthington. “Forever, people will think that we cast him because of [his role in] ‘Terminator Salvation,’ but it had nothing to do with it,” she says. “This was way before. When I saw his tape, it just blew me away. His first audition rocked me. I think Jim got it immediately, and it then became: ‘Can we sell him to the studio?’ [The studio was] pretty reluctant, and there were some [actors] that were a little better known, but we were pretty determined that he was the right choice and hung in there.”
Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri: To cast Neytiri, Simkin and Cameron looked for an actor who could move their body and work well with motion capture. Saldaña told Collider about auditioning: “Sometimes, it was like: ‘Bring some tight stuff; I want you to climb and do some cartwheels.’ And I’m like, ‘OK.’ So I would come in—it’s like, ‘We’ll just play. Let’s move some furniture.’ ”
Simkin says, “For all the Na’vi [actors], it was maybe the only time in my career that I have truly been able to do colorblind casting. The final two people that it got down to for the part…were Zoe and a blond, blue-eyed girl. I can’t imagine another moment in my career when two people so incredibly physically disparate were that close for a part.”
For both Worthington’s and Saldaña’s auditions, Simkin says, “Jim did this really brilliant thing where he cut the two auditions together into one; and [by] doing that, you could really see that they would be great onscreen together.”
Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch: After seeing an ad featuring a very buff Lang in his solo show “Beyond Glory,” a play about the military, Simkin recommended that the “badass military dude” take on the role of the film’s main antagonist. He had gotten into “unbelievable shape” since she’d last seen him in person, she explains.
Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine: Twenty years after her Oscar-nominated performance in Cameron’s 1986 film “Aliens,” Weaver reunited with the filmmaker for “Avatar.” And despite her character’s ultimate fate, the actor returned to portray 14-year-old Kiri in the 2022 sequel.
Giovanni Ribisi as Parker Selfridge: Simkin cast Ribisi as the executive running the planet who goes toe-to-toe with Lang’s character.
Joel David Moore as Norm Spellman: Moore brought the “missing ingredient” of comic relief to the film, Simkin says.
Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy Chacón and CCH Pounder as Mo’at: Simkin emphasizes that both actors are “incredible and hard-working,” contributing to her choice to cast them.
Casting additional avatar and Na’vi characters
While auditioning actors to play the avatars or the Na’vi people, Simkin would notice whether or not they needed to be holding something in their hands. “I think there are actors who, when they’re doing a period movie, they want to be in period underwear,” she says. “And I respect that. But part of this exercise was figuring out who could do their best work while wearing this outfit in this big blank space. You have to be able, as a performer, to internalize.”
The Na’vi speak their own language, created by writer Paul R. Frommer, but he had not invented it in time for Simkin’s auditions for the first film. “I met with him and I asked him to figure out what sounds were difficult for English speakers to say in this language,” she says. “He taught me the sounds, and I would put every actor that came in for one of these roles through their paces of saying those sounds.”
Simkin had actors read some sides in English and then asked them to perform a special acting exercise. “I didn’t care if they said, ‘one, two, three, one, two, three,’ or made up sounds, but they had to express their scenes without English,” she says, “because I knew that the audience [wasn’t] going to know the language, so they’re going to have to convey the scene without language. People came in and did it, and they were really, really brave. And it was remarkable what people did, and really moving. And some of them were unintentionally humorous.”
