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To the casual viewer, Avatar isn’t that different from your average video game. Incredible visuals, amazing creatures, and exciting action, sure, but none of it’s real. It’s all made by computers. Those viewers better not let the famously cantankerous director James Cameron hear it. While we may see only the digitally-rendered blue Na’vi version of Jake Sully on screen, Cameron insists that the character is entirely based on actor Sam Worthington‘s real performance. And Worthington has the upset stomach to prove it.
In an interview with Deadline that covered Cameron and Worthington’s long relationship making three Avatar films, the actor recalled being told to play disgust at a food he was given. “So I said to Jim, ‘Well, you got to just give me something disgusting.’ I think he mixed a concoction of fish oil?” remembered Worthington. “So when I drunk it, it did the exact thing you wanted. It was disgusting. But it was so disgusting it came flying out.”
Yet, even in this supremely and upsettingly physical moment, technology was still involved. “Of course, we’ve got head cams on, so all the liquid hit the head camera,” Worthington continued. “The problem was then, the head camera kind of set on fire. And me being me, I ran around the room, forgetting that it was connected to my head. When all I had to do was take the helmet off.”
Messy as it is, moments like these are exactly what Cameron wants to preserve, even as he pushes the technological limits of filmmaking. The Avatar series may have began as the story of human beings who use technology to create Na’vi versions of themselves to find a valuable element called unobtainium, but Cameron never wants the digital to supplant the physical.
Beyond Worthington’s stomach-churning moment, Cameron also pointed to Sigourney Weaver‘s performance in the second films The Way of Water and Fire and Ash as an example. After playing a human scientist in the first film, Weaver returns to the cast as a Na’vi teen.
“I still see in print media, all the time, ‘Sigourney voices Kiri,’ because they can’t imagine that she’s actually physically performing a 15-year-old at the age of 71, or 72 when she was doing it,” he said. “And it’s like, no, she didn’t do a voice part. She was on the movie for 18 months, performing every scene, including all the underwater work, all the work at the surface, riding the creatures, all that stuff. It’s a complete physical performance. It’s not just a voice performance, right?”
For Cameron, the physical is so important because it allows him to retain the human element in the art of filmmaking, even technologically advanced filmmaking, which cannot be done with AI. But for Worthington, the physical elements are much more simple.
“That’s the process,” he said of his on-set puking experience. “The process is always problem-solving. And it’s often something so out of the box it leads down to these kind of moments.” Those moments may not always be glamorous, but they are always human, which is what Cameron always wants in his films.
Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters worldwide on Friday, December 19, 2025.
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